LETTER FROM STEVE SMITH
From Steve Smith
April 8, 1997
When I first heard the comments of newscasters and so-called "scientists" castigating Pons and Fleischmann for announcing their discovery to the public without going through the "peer" review process, I instinctively knew that something was wrong. An innovator has no peers in the arena of his innovation. I had seen at the university level where all the professors with seniority immediately united to forcibly attack new discoveries of those outside their clique, even though the validity of the discoveries was obvious even to the less educated. They had a vested interest in stomping out the promulgation of any discovery that would threaten their standing and position of authority as tops in their fields etc. and recognize the value of another. When I found the following quote from Ayn Rand in her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, I thought of NEN, since it has been so involved in the arena of reporting innovation and discovery.
"If there is any one way to confess one's own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one's work in the absolute power of a group of one's professional colleagues. Of any forms of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind and against a single enemy: the innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such a monopoly is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice," p 47.
Your friend, Steve Smith
www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_5_1_13.html
May 11, 1997.