As cold fusion events demonstrate, modern science is ruled by conformity

As cold fusion events demonstrate, modern science is ruled by conformity, not the search for scientific truth
Posted by aksell on August 29, 2011

I’ve often wondered why it is that conventionally trained medical doctors are so reluctant to venture outside the limited thinking of conventional medicine. Why are they hesitant to adopt new ideas and new theoretical models for the underlying causes of human health or disease? I think I have at least a partial answer to this question: Doctors only succeed in medical school or in acquiring publication of their studies when they conform with the views and beliefs of their peers. In other words, becoming a successfuldoctorin today’s political-medical environment requires being a conformist. People who are independent thinkers are filtered out of the process early on .

If you challenge thebeliefsof your professors in med school, they’re going to fail you. If you challenge your mentors during residencytraining, they are not going to support your continued training. If you challenge the beliefs of your peers in thescientific community, you are not going to get published. This is how today’s system ofconventional medicine(“scientific medicine”) suppresses the emergence of new ideas and new theories that could produce true breakthroughs in our understanding of health,medicine, science and thenatureof the universe .

Thesciencethat’s published in medical and scientific journals today may indeed be solid science, but it in no way represents all of the goodscientific researchbeing conducted today. There are independent thinkers,scientists, pioneers and outright scientific rebels who are doing extraordinaryresearch, yet never get published. Even worse, their research gets systematically ridiculed by the old school guardians of the scientificcommunity. One of the most obvious examples of this is the team of Fleischmann and Pons, who are, of course, the fathers of “cold fusion,” which is now better known as “low-energy nuclear reactions.”

The systematic discrediting of cold fusion
Cold fusion is still laughed at by people in the mainstream who are too ignorant to realize that cold fusionexperimentsare being replicated and conducted in laboratories all around the world this very minute, most notably in Japan. Low-energy nuclear reactions are quite real. These reactions, which use a palladium catalyst and heavywater, are being used to generate excess heat in laboratories as you read this. In other words, cold fusion is quite real .

If you think back to 1989 and look at the way this issue was suppressed, you realize that the credibility of cold fusion was destroyed by scientists who had career and ego investments in the theories ofhot fusion. These were scientists who had published papers or invested their careers in multi-billion dollar experiments trying to generate free electricity from hot fusion. Thus, the idea that two chemists could create cold fusion with a tabletop experiment was viewed as outrageous. Rather than examining theevidencewith an open mind and try to understand and replicate what was going on, they sought to destroy it .

This ego-fueledsuppressionof cold fusion was quite successful, to the point where, today, if you mention cold fusion to anyone who is steeped in conventional medicine or science, they will laugh at you and say, “Cold fusion is a joke, just like medicalquackery.” But of course, the big joke is on them, because cold fusion does indeed exist, and it has been proven time and time again .

(You can see pictures of a modern cold fusion experiment running at the physics department of Purdue university athttp://www.physics.purdue.edu/neutron/LENR.html)

A 30 percent success rate means it’s real
The reason why cold fusion was difficult to prove back in 1989 is because, during those times, the experimenters were only able to replicate these low-energy nuclear reactions in 30 percent of the experiments. So if a laboratory ran ten experiments, they would obtain low-energy nuclear reactions in three of those ten cases. According to the hot fusion defenders, this was proof enough that cold fusion was a fraud .

Of course, it is scientific insanity to suggest that just because something happens three out of ten times, it doesn’t exist at all. In my view, three out of ten times is pretty darn good for an emerging science that is experimental in nature and very poorly understood. With refinement and additional experiments, that number could doubtlessly have been increased to six or seven out of ten, and perhaps eventually ten out of ten .

Nevertheless, cold fusion was discredited. Today, more than 15 years later, it remains discredited and virtually unknown in the Western world. Meanwhile, Fleischmann and Pons are busy working for private corporations who will, without a doubt, one day release industrial or consumer versions of low-energy nuclear reactors that will provide freeenergyto households, businesses and even entire communities at very little cost .

Every time I write about cold fusion, by the way, I get one or two letters from some “esteemed” professor of physics from some university who thinks it’s his job to explain to me why cold fusion doesn’t exist and can’t work. (It’s a lot like receiving a letter through some sort of time machine, where all the senders of the letters are fifty years behind…) As always, these people remain utterly ignorant of what’s happening in this field. For example, in 1999, the Depart of Energy actually funded a low-energy nuclear reaction lab at the University of Illinois. Read it yourself athttp://www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_6_10_1.html .

There are now over 400 scientific papers on cold fusion, most of which are now available athttp://www.lenr-canr.org/, the leading cold fusion community website. This site provides excellent reading on the history of cold fusion as well as the many challenges still being faced in this search for genuine scientific understanding .

Modern science seeks to protect its interests, not to reveal truth
The suppression of cold fusion is just one example of how our modern the scientific community operates more like a group of high priests than seekers of genuine scientific understanding. As a result, the science we live with today only represents a small fraction of the true scientific knowledge available to mankind. Much of the good science conducted over the last hundred years has been suppressed (cold fusion is just the beginning of this story). It has largely been concealed to protect either the financial interests of certain corporations or the ego interests of certain individuals or scientific groups .

In the world of so-called “evidence-based medicine,” the defenders of conventional medicine, which include the American Medical Association,medical schoolsand conventionally traineddoctors, also want to protect their territory. They want to remain in control over all medical decisions and health-related interactions withpatients. Yet, they have very few qualifications for actually doing so. For example, medicalschoolsdon’t even teach basicnutrition, and doctors graduate from medical schools and residence training with practically no understanding of nutrition whatsoever. They have no real qualifications to talk to patients aboutdiseaseprevention through healing foods, or to talk about how to live a healthy life through intelligentfoodchoice. These are the basics ofhealth, yet they are almost entirely ignored bymodern medicine .

Many of the most promising healing modalities are not just ignored by conventional medicine; they are in fact ridiculed. Homeopathy comes to mind.Homeopathy is discredited simply because the defenders of conventional medicine have no understanding of the mechanism by whichhomeopathicremedies work. It’s similar to saying that there is no such thing asinfectious diseasebecause we can’t see anygerms(which was once the official position of science-based medicine). Of course, once the microscope was invented, germs could be seen, and the acceptance of the scientific validity of infectious disease soon followed .

Some day, there will be instruments that can measure the vibrational nature, or what is called the “memory,” of water. When those instruments are available,homeopathywill seem to be common sense, but today it is considered fringe science or quackery by the defenders of conventional medicine because they don’t see how it could possibly work. They leave no room in theirbelief systemsfor the possibility that something could operate outside their current understanding. As long as there is no microscope for seeing homeopathic energy, the stodgy, egoistic defenders of evidence-based medicine will call it quackery. Of course, this is the samethinkingthat once called the germ theory quackery .

Ego is the enemy of science innovation
As you may have guessed, egos are a big part of the problem in all of this, because it is the ego that prevents people from challenging their current belief systems and adopting new ideas that require them to change. It’s often said that college professors hate to rewrite their courses, and I think that’s a good description of what’s occurring on a much larger scale here .

No one wants to rewrite their theories, re-evaluate their belief systems or admit they were wrong. Scientific understanding thus only progresses at the rate that leaders of conventional science retire or die. Thank goodness they do, because when that happens, they take their old, distorted belief systems with them, thereby making room for the new understanding and belief systems of the next generation of scientists. Science thus marches forward slowly, not on a schedule conducive to breakthroughs or true scientific research, but more along one that is dictated by the retirement of old guard defenders of outdated scientific theory .

The bottom line is: We as consumers should be wary any time someone says they have a “scientific approach” or an “evidence-based approach” to medicinal herbs, nutrition, pharmaceuticals or medicine.Anything that’s based on evidence is also subject to the distortions and belief systems of old-guard scientists and doctors who currently control the intellectual topography in which this evidence is framed. Just because something claims to be based on evidence doesn’t mean it’s true, nor that it stands up to genuine scientific scrutiny. And just because something is called quackery or rejected by the scientific community doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It could simply mean that a sufficient number of old school scientists haven’t died yet to make room for these new observations or theories .

Remember, current scientific “truth” is defined and guarded by a committee of the most powerful people and organizations in the scientific community (it’s called “peer review”). Anyone who has ever worked on a committee knows real progress under such systems is slow and painful. Real scientific progress usually comes from determined, outcast scientific rebels who are viciously attacked by old guard defenders of the current scientific community. You might recognize a few of their names: Einstein, Semmelweis, Copernicus, Tesla, and more than a few others .

Filed in: Medicine A - N

Isn’t the placebo effect “alternative” medicine? Science does not understand it well enough (yet) to make it a reliable treatment.

However, it’s also important to be aware of science’s very real limitations. Its realm is restricted to what’s repeatable and reproducible. It can’t deal with one-time events, or those that seem totally spurious. So “miracles”, “seers” that might predict a future event, in other words all the “paranormal” space is outside science’s scope, even though it is part of reality.

No, the placebo effect is very understandable within the realm of medical science. It is very well established that a person's mental attitude affects their health, and the placebo directly affects a person's mental attitude.

In contrast, "alternative" medicine is marketed on the basis that it is NOT supported by science, and that its effectiveness is based on mysterious principles unknown by "mainstream" science.

Most of what would be called "supernatural" is not actually outside the realm of science (which is the art of observing the physical world around us). Just because an event is "one-time" doesn't mean that it was caused by some non-natural agent; in order for a scientist to observe something, they first have to figure out the conditions under which it occurs. A rare enough event might not be observable scientifically. Ditto with "miracles." It would be called a miracle, for instance, if someone would recover from incurable cancer. Yet, despite the fact that it rarely happens, there is no reason the body can't mount an effective immune response against cancer. And with "seers"--there are any number of reasons they might predict a future event. Many fortune tellers, for instance, are good judges of human nature, who can ascertain that certain events are likely in a person's life just by asking a few pointed questions and watching their body language while they answer.

I know that it is not very romantic to reject the supernatural. But the natural world around me is teeming with such wonders that I don't need to turn to the supernatural to find the amazing.

"This would have to just entail a shift in attitudes to the point that people would go back to sharing their results in the same way they did before what we currently call "peer review" existed. And it wasn't that long ago, historically speaking."

Y'know, I think "Free Republic" would be a good model to do this. A scientific paper would be "published" as news stories are currently (in full, NOT ABSTRACTED), and "peer review" take place via the comments. You'd get a lot of chaff along with the heat, but I think it could work. Problem is how to run it so it pays for itself.

“I know that it is not very romantic to reject the supernatural. But the natural world around me is teeming with such wonders that I don’t need to turn to the supernatural to find the amazing.”

I didn’t call those things “supernatural” - you did. I’m not a romantic when it comes to “alternative” stuff - in fact I take them with a great deal of salt. I referred to them as paranormal. In fact I explicitly stated that those one time events are part of reality, but science cannot do much with them other than speculate because, again, the scientific method relies on reproducibility and repeatability. Having said that I’m all in favor of science investigating paranormal events.

By the way, I’m an engineer, so I appreciate science and nature very much, and am awed at how much it has contributed to our understanding of the universe. It is undoubtedly one of man’s greatest achievement. Still I believe its wise to know and appreciate its limits.

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