As I recall, Wickramasingh and Chandrasekhar were colleagues of Fred Hoyle
Correct, but they were outsiders. Hoyle, to an extent, was an outsider as well given his background.
Fred Hoyle who got so sick of the company of academics that he became a SF writer.
Hoyle wrote a little science fiction as have other scientists. The fact of his writing had little to do with his distaste for other scientists (a common affliction of brilliant men) but far more to do with his wishing to popularise science and earn a few pennies. He never became a full time science fiction writer. If you are able to read the minds of dead genius' then you should report immediately to the Society for Psychical Research.
NB I might have used the term genii, but that would have been pretentious.
However, I don't recall ever being agin' the privileged classes. It's just the academics that bother me, rich or poor.
But you have railed against the groupthink indulged by scientists, sorry
academics. Do you now wish to change your position and say that even those who operate from outside the group are all part and parcel of the same conspiracy? This change to a broadbrush attack on all persons involved in academia strikes me as just being the inverse of the snobbery that insists that only those who have had a university level education are worthy of respect.
Fleischmann and Pons have been attacked and hounded at every opportunity.
And rightly so. They went beyond their area of expertise, put forward an unfounded and unevidenced hypothesis and used their academic and scientific credentials to evade proper peer review and publish. The best light that can be put on it was that it was hubris of the first magnitude and the worst that it was near fraudulent.
The never ending and pointless hot fusion project crowd had visions of endless jobs for the boys. After fifty or sixty years, no progress. If they worked for a private company the would have been sacked long ago.
In the same way that nuclear physicists and engineers working for private industry are dismissed for their nonsensical support of badly designed kettles? Or perhaps in the same way that geologists and chemists should be fired for their continual support of polluting state supported industries and that's ignoring CO2. Companies love big capital intensive projects.
Incidentally, I believe DARPA is still investigating the phenomenon and they are very much part of academia. Interestingly neither Elon Musk nor Dyson, both very much outsiders, have shown any interest in "cold fusion".
The fringe is an interesting phrase, being another way of saying it's something that science prefers not to mention.
That is not what I said. I suggest you read what I wrote, not what you would have liked me to say.
Don't kid yourself about time. There is no known method by which you can prove, scientifically or philosophically, that it exists.
And I have no intention of so doing. I stated that even if "Time" is found to be unnecessary for the functioning adequate theories about the universe than there remains the anthropic problem. We experience what we call time. We also observe entropy, smooth space and absolute position. Again, read what I said not what you want me to say.
