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Comment by zackees | Hacker News Reader

> “Quite frankly, [to] other folks who have tried this over the years, it was considered a career ender,”

An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender.

There is simply no reason for this.

Think how many resources has been put into anti-carbon messaging to transform the economies and the promotion of a global tax. Meanwhile a technology that can make the whole CO2 problem obsolete is taken to the back alley like this and figuratively murdered.

Why?

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“An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender.ll

My understanding is that it’s a career ender because it has repeatedly been shown to not work. You also can’t investigate Perpetual Movement Machines because they can’t work either. It would be nice if it worked but it doesn’t make sense to change something that’s basically a pipe dream.

Yup, I feel no field of scientific research should be off-limits (except for some immoral research like certain experiments on humans).

The only career ender should be scientific dishonesty.

An experiment that is rigorous and scientifically sound should always be valid.

In theory, this is the purpose of tenure. Advancing to tenure status should make your subsequent research into LENR unassailable. In practice, I guess you still have to toe the line, and apply for grants...

Same thing with plan to plant trees to reduce C02. Unfortunately groups sometimes use outcomes (climate change, mass shootings, spotted owl habitat protection, salmon spawning) to propose solutions that are beneficial to an ideology or an agenda rather than a solution that is without bias. Problems are tools.

Universities pay professors who have research topics attractive to funding agencies and students. If you saw a physics professor specializing in Bohmian mechanics and pilot-wave theory, you'd steer clear.

The reputation of CF as a pseudo-science also points towards a career ender.

However, Bohmian mechanics are not pseudo-science. It is a beautiful useless interpretation of quantum mechanics that has many problems, but at least it is still science. Cold fusion I agree tends towards pseudo-science.

I can understand that it makes sense to teach the most useful stuff at the university, however I do wish that I could have had the choice to follow an optional "obscure, useless topics" lecture during my years in university.

"Follow the money"

When people's income depends on not being displaced by a new technology, you can bet that they will be dyed-in-the-wool Luddites.

When Cold Fusion was first announced way back in the 90s (IIRC) it was felt that the whole of the energy industries would be immediately affected by being replaced by small, clean, efficient fusion technology. Strange, that an immediate clamp down occurred on all Cold Fusion information, experimentation, etc.

Personally, I don't know whether Cold Fusion exists or not. But the absolute denigration of anything to do with it seems a bit suspicious to me.

Several researchers have reported energy production, but everybody else can't seem to replicate it, whether that's by accident or design.

Your conspiracy would have to go across multiple state-owned power companies, communist governments, and countries at economic war with each other.

Why hasn't Shenzhen rediscovered it? Everyone's rediscovered nuclear power and fusion bombs by now.

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