Notes from Mallove's "Fire from Ice", Part III

The third, and last of the series on Mallove's book, Fire from Ice, which is about the history of cold fusion.  I pick up from the last post, which was from the beginning of the book.  As I mentioned earlier, I am skipping around the book looking for interesting parts which correlate with my own posts on the subject here.  The first thing I want to show is the breadth of interest in cold fusion from the beginning.  Since the book was written in 1991, and "cold fusion" is still somewhat in the news, there must be something that is driving it.  This picture here shows a partial list of the people from all over the world who were working on this at the time this book was written.

World wide interest in 'cold fusion'- three pages of the names of scientists working on it back in 91

More notes here:

p. 261   There's a mention of a "cold fusion" powered automobile.
p. 264   The story about Jerry Bishop, science editor of the Wall Street Journal getting the "pc" treatment somewhat akin to the treatment that Juan Williams got.  His offense was to write about "cold fusion".
p. 268  Discussion of the problem: party defined as a war between scientific camps- hot v 'cold' fusion, and how reporters were supposed to cover it by being impartial.  False war based upon false conflict, imo.
p. 271 Carl Sagan's prediction that "cold fusion" would be proved-disproved in five years.  Obviously, this didn't happen.
p. 272 Bad reporting on superconductivity, another way the journalists blew it ( contemporaneous event ).

And the last bit I'll mention is Chapter 17, which is about the Hard Lessons of Science.  I'll sum it all up with a flip phrase: don't get stuck on stupid.  I've written before, ideology makes us stupid.  It can blind us to what we really need to see.  People have the need to believe, but there's also a need to understand that you need to keep an open mind to avoid blinding your ability to see what's there waiting to be discovered.