“ More specifically, Hall advocates for renewing research into cold fusion. He doesn’t make a strong claim that cold fusion is a real phenomena but argues that research on it was passed over too quickly by funding agencies.”
This is the real red flag to not take the book’s author seriously.
I agree actually. This is one of those books with a few rough edges. The cold fusion section was interesting but kinda was an unnecessary tangent in my view. He never explicitly said he thought cold fusion is probably real, but it verged on that. To steel man his argument, he was arguing that the backlash and incredulity of funders was too great and we should invest more into it given the expected returns. However he also mentions how a lot of replications were attempted and that the Navy (IIRC) has been researching cold fusion to some degree or another since the 80s... so it also sorta sounded like it's already been researched enough. BTW, my friend Steve Byrnes (now a noted AI safety researcher) has researched cold fusion extensively in his spare time and it looks like the tldr is he's still very skeptical about it (https://coldfusionblog.net/about/).
Great article. Nice read with my morning coffee. Howard (Toronto).
Thanks Howard! Great to hear!
“ More specifically, Hall advocates for renewing research into cold fusion. He doesn’t make a strong claim that cold fusion is a real phenomena but argues that research on it was passed over too quickly by funding agencies.”
This is the real red flag to not take the book’s author seriously.
I agree actually. This is one of those books with a few rough edges. The cold fusion section was interesting but kinda was an unnecessary tangent in my view. He never explicitly said he thought cold fusion is probably real, but it verged on that. To steel man his argument, he was arguing that the backlash and incredulity of funders was too great and we should invest more into it given the expected returns. However he also mentions how a lot of replications were attempted and that the Navy (IIRC) has been researching cold fusion to some degree or another since the 80s... so it also sorta sounded like it's already been researched enough. BTW, my friend Steve Byrnes (now a noted AI safety researcher) has researched cold fusion extensively in his spare time and it looks like the tldr is he's still very skeptical about it (https://coldfusionblog.net/about/).