Have you read “Bad Science” by Gary Taubes? It is a full telling of the Cold Fusion fiasco. Prior to reading it I thought P&T were just poor fools caught up in a mistake. Afterwards I realized that they were borderline con-artists who made their own trouble by telling more and more lies as they went along. The truly deserve the scorn they receive.
Its always ‘just around the corner!’.
OK, you figure out how to stabilize 100 million K of plasma and tell everyone how easy it is.
Are we talking about cold fusion or female orgasms?
Fusion, unless the female in question is Supergirl. Otherwise the power output is a bit low.
The generating equipment ought to look pretty interesting, though.
Am I the only one who sees this as the main problem in the story?]
Yet they have somehow produced a machine to produce energy based on a theory they don’t actually have?
They got lucky?
…Thereby producing a female orgasm. It all comes together, now!
Once, in 1982, on Valentines day, for 20 microseconds.
I didn’t see anyone answer this, so I thought I’d throw my experience into the ring … I was an upper-level undergrad at the physics department of a major university when Pons & Fleischmann made their splash, and it cause no end of excitement for a short period of time. There was a team trying to replicate their results, and any number of professors and graduate students poring over the data that was supplied from the ‘successful’ experiments. I recall it taking about three weeks before it all got written off, although there were questions asked very early on about discrepancies between the description of what was happening and the data that was provided.
There have been a handful of ‘true believers’ continuing to do experiments ever since–this has never really gone away–but I’ve never heard of any significant & replicable results coming out of all this research.