poly: Clarke endorses cold fusion

On P. 1533 of the June 5 Science, Arthur Clarke writes:

  "I was surprised when Pons and Fleischmann announced that
they had achieved fusion in the laboratory; and surprise
changed to disappointment when I learned that most of those
who had rushed to confirm these results were unable to replicate
them. Wondering how these two world-class scientists could
have fooled themselves, I then forgot the whole matter for a
year or so, until more and more reports surfaced, from many
countries, of anomalous energy production in various devices ...
Now I have little doubt that anomalous energy is being produced
by several devices, some of which are on the market with a money
back guarantee, while others are covered by patents. The
literature on the subject is enormous, and my confidence that
`new energy' is real slowly climted to the 90th percentile, and
has now reached the 99% level. ... Pons and Fleishman will be
the only scientists ever to win both the Nobel and the Ig Noble
Prizes."

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627
Received on Tue Jun 9 19:33:38 1998