if the U.S. continues to ban research The US has not banned cold fusion research, nor has it banned cloning research, nor antigravity research, nor any of the other areas of current interest. The US might withhold Federal funding since it has to prioritize projects, and it might ban use of Federal property in certain special cases such as fetal stem cell research. Cold fusion research in the US is not banned, even though it might be banned in the average kitchen.
RightWhale writes:
"The US has not banned cold fusion research, nor has it banned cloning research, nor antigravity research, nor any of the other areas of current interest."
In my opinion, the U.S. has effectively banned cold fusion research. That is to say, many powerful people in the U.S. Navy, DoE, APS the major journals and other leading institutions have ordered that no funding be allowed for any experiment, no paper be published, and no discussion be allowed at physics conferences. The Navy and others have ordered that a researcher who requests funding, attends conferences, or tries to publish a paper be punished. By "punished" I mean the researchers were reassigned to menial jobs, they had their telephones turned off, and they were denied permission to enter a laboratory, use any laboratory instrument, copy machine, etc.
Many people who are well versed in the history of cold fusion agree with me, most notably the late Julian Schwinger, Nobel Laureate. As a senior member of the APS he was supposed to have the right to publish any paper he wished overriding peer-review in some journals, but they refused to allow him to publish a paper about cold fusion. He resigned in protest, and later wrote:
"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf He was not joking, or exaggerating. Unless you have carefully examined the events and the problems that he and others encountered, I do not think you can judge whether the research has been banned. You can learn part of this history by reading the New Scientist article, the paper by Bockris, the anti-cold fusion diatribes published by the APS, Scientific American, New Scientist and the book by Beaudette. Of course, the history is complicated and multifaceted. For that matter, some research in the U.S. is allowed, and is continuing. But overall, if this is not a “ban” on research, I cannot imagine what would be. I suppose the authorities might begin throwing researchers into jail, or firebombing labs. In 1989 some of the leading plasma fusion scientists at the DoE said that Pons and Fleischmann were frauds and they should be arrested and imprisoned, so they have at least considered such extreme measures.
- Jed