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At the time of writing this, there seemed to be a majority of a hollow dismissal tone to most comments in the thread.
by th0ma5 11y ago
At the time of writing this, there seemed to be a majority of a hollow dismissal tone to most comments in the thread.
- mikeash 11y ago"HN commenters dismiss it" is pretty far from "physicists refuse to test it," especially when the dismissal is based on test results.
- th0ma5 11y agoI guess I wanted to know more about cold fusion, and you have to be really careful because there is just so so much bullshit out there from scammer link spam people and UFO crazy people. Then, however, there are just tons of physicists using it as a punchline... so after you weed through all of that, you do get to some of the US Navy stuff, some of the real people doing the work, but even a video series about it from some MIT professors say that you can't just go around talking about it because it is career suicide. Anyway... I started to hear some of that tone, and I guess I assume that there really are some physicists here on HN, and so I posted what I did.
- mikeash 11y agoI think that last part is where you've gone wrong. I'm sure you've seen discussions about computers in non-computer forums, where there's just an astonishing amount of cluelessness on display but the people don't know enough to realize they have it all wrong. It's likely the same here but in reverse. (And to be clear, I don't exclude myself from it at all.) I'm sure there are some actual physicists here, but most of the commenters are informed laymen, with all the good and bad that implies.
- th0ma5 11y agoYeah, you're probably right... thank you, heh.