The West Hunter blog guy (G. Cochran?) has gotten a little strange over the years. Still, he posts interesting things every couple of months. Today's post, if not entirely persuasive to the non-paranoid among us, would at least make a terrific premise for a thriller. He mentions something that most science fiction writers noticed in the 1940s, and that my father confirmed to me from his own experience, which is that people who paid attention to these things were quite aware of the likely significance of the sudden radio silence in the early 1940s in the field of nuclear fission research publication. As I recall, the U.S. authorities actually interrogated some science fiction writers and other civilians about where they were getting their ideas. They were able to point out persuasively that it was hard to miss the sudden disappearance from public life of nearly everyone in the field.
Cochran's theory is that we were naive back then. Instead of an abrupt cessation of research publication, we should have reduced the output gradually, replacing it with word salad and irreproducible results, just like . . . hmmmm.
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Nah, they're just incoherent. Nobody's coming to save us. There's no secret plan to improve things. You've seen what their best and brightest can do in Afghanistan.
I read him off AVI's blogroll as well. I thought the idea was offered mostly in jest as I think it has some definite downsides from a practical standpoint. The specific instance where a single wrong-headed article penned by a notable somebody who made a minor but critical mistake didn't seem recreatable. In a new field or during critical advances in an established one, how do you know what that minor but critical mistake is going to be? How do you know the other side is going to hold your expert in the same high regard you do? They might recreate the experiment and just think he was incompetent when they get different results. You might run into the same problem that codebreakers have where getting lucky too many times tips the enemy off that you actually have advanced knowledge. Too many experiments that turn out to be bogus or off by *that* much could raise the same suspicions. Radio silence at least deprives the enemy of any additional knowledge they might gain inadvertently even if it does signal that you thing a particular subject is critical.
Remember Asimov's "The Dead Past"?
Watching for the silences can be important. I read that sonar "quiet zones" were one way to look for submarines.
And do you remember the stories about Trump and Ukraine from several years back? They dropped away in favor of fiction about Russia. I can't say for sure, but I suspect some Senators wanted the narrative to go away because their own dealings might come to light.
Even now I hear more about China and Hunter than Ukraine and Hunter.
Cochran is flipping brilliant but you are right, his site has gotten stranger, more enigmatic over the last few years. He is apparently carrying on online arguments with some heavy hitters he thinks are fools - twitter? - and uses his site to kick them every once in a while. I don't know what to make of it.
The problem with trying to apply this theory of disguise in modern reporting is that it's hard to see the lines. I have had dozens of patients over the years tell me (just one example of a delusion) "You used to see lots on TV shows and movies about the government implanting chips in your brain (a common delusion for those whose paranoia started in the 90s) and then suddenly it just stopped. That tells you that it's real and they are trying to cover it up." Over at Cochran's post there was an immediate comment that there had been a paper showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin and then these things just started disappearing (meaningful look), like this proves it. I am just so tired of this nonsense going mainstream now after having to deal with it professionally for so many decades.
Harry Harpending also used to be a contributor to that blog, but he died a few years ago.
True, it is easy to find patterns in blankness, especially if your sources are limited.
Still, it would make a ripping jumping-off point for a thriller. I didn't buy the ideas in "Conspiracy Theory," either, but it was a rollicking good movie.
Poly-water?
Cold fusion?
The EM-pulse reactionless drive? (which I loved, just 'cause it sounds like Captain Kirk's "impulse" engines)
Oddly we now hardly hear about "greenhouse gases" and "global warming" as much as we do just generic "climate change" attributed to "fossil fuels" without any interconnecting mechanisms. As if a rung on the logical ladder were broken but the ladder itself is too important to discard.
It's not difficult to see that US media is awful about abandoning on-going "narratives" in favor of the novel and celebrity-driven. Mass shootings (and vehicular homicide, and IEDs) by "lone wolf" crazy people (sometimes and even often, Muslims) against crowds in Europe are so un-headlined that our own mass murders seem odd by comparison. China's gradual incursions into Hong Kong are supplanted by Russia/Ukraine. And it's not like "Gay" rights are a solved problem but who cares, we move to the problems of the "trans" community.
It's a likely useful heuristic to look for "holes" but maybe not to use in isolation of other tools.
" As if a rung on the logical ladder were broken but the ladder itself is too important to discard. "
Yeah, pretty much that.
It got harder and harder to find any horror stories about treatment of gays, but it's still possible to find people who--gasp--don't want to date a woman with male genitals, or even share a bathroom with him/her. You've got to keep moving the goalposts in order to find new "intolerant" people.
Cold fusion is an interesting example. It trailed away in the news when the P&F results were found hard to verify and P&F themselves proved excessively cagey about letting other people inspect their setup. And some people started to notice that the "energy excess" was on top of a hot apparatus; getting useful energy out, assuming it was true at all, was going to be complicated.
It might look like suppression if you didn't look at the problems with P&F's work with an engineer's eye.
But the same day the P&F paper came out to hoopla, another paper circulated--I read a fax of a fax of a fax--with far more reasonable results: a slight neutron excess. Nothing you'd generate free energy with, but a perfectly reasonable nuclear physics result.
If you relied on the newspaper alone, you'd not discover that there were many efforts to reproduce the results, over quite a few years, using several different schemes to dissolve hydrogen and heat the result--and, IIRC, even an attempt to pressurize the active volume to get the hydrogen nuclei even closer together.
The information was out there, but it wasn't tossed on your doorstep.
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