Word: fusions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there is any specimen lower than a fornicating preacher, it must be a shady scientist. The dissolute evangelist betrays his one revealed Truth, but the scientist who rushes half-cocked into print or, worse yet, falsifies the data subverts the whole idea of truth. Cold fusion in a teacup? Or, as biologists (then at M.I.T.) David Baltimore and Thereza Imanishi-Kari claimed in a controversial 1986 article that the National Institutes of Health has now judged to be fraudulent, genes from one mouse mysteriously "imitating" those from another? Sure, and parallel lines might as well meet somewhere or apples leap...
...alternative energy source that will not become practical for a long time, if it ever does, is nuclear fusion, which can use ordinary water as fuel. The difficulty is that fusion requires temperatures as high as hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, and scientists have been unable to develop reactors that can handle that. Reports that some researchers achieved "cold fusion" at room temperature now produce more chuckles than heat...
...then there are the breakthroughs that become embarrassments. Cold fusion is probably in this category. So is the discovery, reported two years ago, that under certain conditions a gyroscope weighs less when spun upside down. If that were true, it would force scientists to rewrite the laws of gravity...
...question so vital settled so decisively. The gulf debate is the closest politics gets to a controlled experiment. Hypotheses were advanced, and 43 days later the results were in. In the scientific world, one side admits error at this point. Those who believe in Lamarck or cold fusion either recant or retire...
Baltimore and his former colleagues at M.I.T. owe O'Toole an apology, if not a job. And like other scientists currently facing critical scrutiny -- including AIDS researcher Robert Gallo and cold-fusion gurus Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons -- they owe it to themselves to take a close look at their thin-skinned response. Making mistakes is part of science. But blindly denying the possibility of error goes against the heart of the scientific method. Baltimore seems to have worried more about a colleague's reputation than about the truth of a junior researcher's complaint...