Bob Park on Joe Newman (again).

Bob Park in What's New (April 1, 2005):

On Monday, [Newman] held a press conference here in the National Press Building. Joe made one contribution to society in his lifetime, by suing the Patent Office for denying him a patent. The 1986 decision in Newman v. Quigg (the Patent Commissioner) is now cited as the authority for denying patent applications for perpetual motion machines out of hand.

Meanwhile, the New Scientist got around in March 2005 to discussing the DOE report on cold fusion from 2004:

In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it [US DOE] said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments. That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results...were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false. David Nagel of George Washington University: "The experimental case is bulletproof. You can't make it go away." New Scientist, March 19-25, 2005. pp. 37-38.


The New Scientist neglected to report that the DOE said its willingness to accept proposals on cold fusion was not a change. [Scientific American also belatedly discussed the DOE report.]

I don't know what Park has to say about the New Scientist on cold fusion (or on Jan-Hendrik Schon)