Everyone is weighing in on the latest Ida fossil news, so here’s my take. For me, what’s interesting is how times have changed. When the original story came out, it smelled wrong. Not from a scientific perspective - I don’t have enough information to comment on that – but the fact that publication of a peer-reviewed paper was not the focus. Instead there was a David Attenborough-voiced documentary on the BBC, a book, a press conference…it was SO much worse than the whole cold fusion debacle that is held up as the worst case of bad science, basically because a press conference preceded their peer-reviewed paper.
So how come it’s OK to do it like this now?
Well, maybe it isn’t – if you ask Jørn Hurum’s scientific peers, many will say he’s a showman (and that’s not a good thing among scientists – I once heard Michio Kaku described as “the Jerry Springer of string theory”, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment). But the fact is, everyone now expects, or even wants, a bit of showmanship from their scientists (hence Kaku’s popularity?).
So, in many ways, Pons and Fleischmann were simply ahead of their time. I wonder what would happen if their announcement of a potentially revolutionary new energy source had come in 2009, not 1989?
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