cold fusion
The term "cold fusion" refers to a bunch of junk science that was suppose to save the world in the days of Milli Vanilli
After the talk that made the science work was successfully press released by orders of a university patent troll many giant laboratories and famous universities started their work on what would later be known as the most amateurish set of "replications" in human history. They had a copy of the official text and a picture of some device of some kind shown at the presentation but reportedly practically all replications failed. Some scientists did manage to get the story to work for them but their version wasn't half as effective as the original performance. "Girl You Know It's True"
Some stubborn and some ignorant scientists refused to give up and admit their mistake. Mostly old people. They refused to stop tinkering with this junk science. Not that anyone would still publish stuff like that but you know old people. Once stuck in a pattern they just cant stop. It provided much entertainment.
Lots of years went by, the old people had been tinkering with the junk science all along and now they started seeing things. Of course by now they had changed the entire experiment, it was no longer the story that made it all work but they had build a device that looked exactly like the one in the picture and it did almost the exact things the original story claimed it would do.
We had all been laughing at those people for all those years so no one thought this was funny. Saving the world and all that is nice but now we had to admit we was wrong to?!?! WTF??
This was of course unacceptable, great effort was made to stall the old people and debunk their ideas, take away their funding etc. Eventually most of them died of old age and life went back to normal. Yes, that was kind of lame and I'm not even referring to that funny joke I just made.
More years went by, for some reason the work wasn't forgotten about, just like any good multilevel marketing scheme all sorts of new brand names popped up to avoid the original karma debt, miraculous names came up from transmutation all the way to the great oxymoron "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions". Seriously, wtf lol?
And they wouldn't shut up about it. It was gawd awful this saving the world stuff. It was clearly not worth it. As the Great Eugene Malove use to say "cold fusion is dead but the corps is still twitching".
So now we had a version of cold fusion that ran on stories, one that involved a working apparatus, then a 3rd brand of cold fusion appeared that seems to run on both stories and a working apparatus no one was allowed to look inside of. Much to the frustration of the open source community, the wikipedians and other linuxers. In Bologna of all places, you cant make this stuff up. The recipe was now completely different from the original but that never bothered anyone. The story told by Andrea Rossi worked even better than the initial announcement back in the days. Nobody knows how it works but after a year of daily demonstrations the heat production seems undeniable. All Gore was right?
At this stage the poor people had pretty much ran out of money, the oil and the drinking water ran out, Italy was bankrupt, Americans went back to living in Wigwams, smoking the peace pipe and using all parts of the buffalo. AKA the good life. The only problem was that it turned out the economy depended on all those poor people - and as we all know the economy is the most important thing in the universe. We tried just printing money for a while but eventually it became clear the economic slaves also had a purchasing function in the economy, who would have thought that?! If they cant buy products bad things will happen with the economy.
Then credible sources reported it was now okay to just talk about cold fusion in public. No longer was it a discredited invention by a discredited inventor in a discredited city in a country without credit.
Being such an awesome author I'd say the work left to do is to figure out what the term Cold Fusion REALLY refers to. I mean you don't think people refer to the music when they are pulling a Milli Vanilli?
I had some ideas already.
* I'm so cold fused right now.
* Adding to the cold fusion. (look how it is the same as the one above, get it?)
* You are cold fusion the issue.
* Cold fusion may also refer to huge mobs of professionals acting like fucking amateurs. Where Polywater refers to the stuff they are doing. (that was a good story to)
* If you believe that I have a cold fusion to sell you
* The journal cold fusioned my paper!