"Broader approach", yes: let's not forget the version of fusion reported by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989. You thought that that had been discredited perhaps? Wrong! It is true that a number of teams failed to replicate the experiment, but that does happen sometimes when the experimental conditions are critical. Other people persisted, and got results eventually. Why does one not hear about this? In a word, censorship: it is the practice of many editors to return such papers without sending them out to be refereed (I am surprised to learn that it is the opinion of the President of the Royal Society that that is the privilege of editors to do this if it fits their sincerely held prejudices, but it seems to me that this is a perfect recipe for slowing the advance of science).
Unlike the sceptics who prefer to criticise from their armchairs, I have gone ahead and visited no fewer than three laboratories where such research is going on, in order to get at the facts. My latest was a visit to the experiment of Thomas Claytor of LANL, who is measuring tritium production in a glow discharge with a view to finding out which electrode materials give the highest yield. (The sceptics will I suppose claim that he is adding the tritium somehow, in which case why don't they go along to the lab and see if that is what is in fact happening?)
Who will be the first editor of a major journal to bring this lunatic situation to an end, by being brave enough to publish such results as these? Then, maybe, there can be a concentrated effort to realise whatever potential there may be from this new energy source."
