01-10-2018, 12:20 PM
Hi
I know "conspiracy theory" is a very loaded term, but which "officially" debunked ideas do you find interesting? You might be a believer, maybe you are uncertain, or curious despite not believing. Let's try and keep away from politics, (e.g. Clinton, Trump, Obama) to keep it friendly and non-partisan.
Let me start with an unusual one... cold fusion. In 1989 Pons and Fleischmann claimed they were getting nuclear fusion at room temperature with fairly simple lab apparatus. If it were true then we'd have this amazing source of green energy at a low cost.
Scientists around the world rushed to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's findings. The big universities failed, Los Alamos couldn't do it, nor Harwell in the UK. But after a few days a small team at Georgia Tech announced they'd successfully replicated it. Then, a few days later they backtracked and went in front of the press to explain it was an obscure fault with the measuring apparatus. There was no cold fusion - there never had been. In their haste they'd failed to run a control experiment.
At that point things went wild at G Tech. The switchboard was in meltdown with people wanting to know what the oil companies had paid to silence the scientists. Many people believe the effect was real, and silenced by those with vested interests.
I don't believe the cold fusion worked, but I find this an incredible story, and to this day many amateur/self-taught scientists work on their own cold fusion projects so clearly a lot of people do believe it. There is an annual cold fusion conference that's been running since 1990, but it is an outcast among the scientific community and apparently of more interest to sociologists than physicists.
We are currently spending billions on developing "hot" nuclear fusion e.g. €20bn on ITER. They'll probably get there eventually, but it ain't cheap, and turning it into power stations that actually feed into the grid is a long way off. Pity that cold fusion didn't work...
I know "conspiracy theory" is a very loaded term, but which "officially" debunked ideas do you find interesting? You might be a believer, maybe you are uncertain, or curious despite not believing. Let's try and keep away from politics, (e.g. Clinton, Trump, Obama) to keep it friendly and non-partisan.
Let me start with an unusual one... cold fusion. In 1989 Pons and Fleischmann claimed they were getting nuclear fusion at room temperature with fairly simple lab apparatus. If it were true then we'd have this amazing source of green energy at a low cost.
Scientists around the world rushed to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's findings. The big universities failed, Los Alamos couldn't do it, nor Harwell in the UK. But after a few days a small team at Georgia Tech announced they'd successfully replicated it. Then, a few days later they backtracked and went in front of the press to explain it was an obscure fault with the measuring apparatus. There was no cold fusion - there never had been. In their haste they'd failed to run a control experiment.
At that point things went wild at G Tech. The switchboard was in meltdown with people wanting to know what the oil companies had paid to silence the scientists. Many people believe the effect was real, and silenced by those with vested interests.
I don't believe the cold fusion worked, but I find this an incredible story, and to this day many amateur/self-taught scientists work on their own cold fusion projects so clearly a lot of people do believe it. There is an annual cold fusion conference that's been running since 1990, but it is an outcast among the scientific community and apparently of more interest to sociologists than physicists.
We are currently spending billions on developing "hot" nuclear fusion e.g. €20bn on ITER. They'll probably get there eventually, but it ain't cheap, and turning it into power stations that actually feed into the grid is a long way off. Pity that cold fusion didn't work...
