Jed Rothwell wrote:
Mike Carrell wrote:
Pay attention: target "was". He did get investments from electric utilities.
He and others would have billions of dollars to work with if only he would take steps to convince the world the effect is real.
He'd also be in line for Nobel prize, assuming his theory has something to do with the results he's obtained (not a foregone conclusion, of course).
[ ... ]
The only similar [runs-on-demand] device in CF that was ever developed was the Patterson cell, which was deliberately hidden the same way Mills hid his devices.
Didn't the Patterson cell suffer from "Dr. Jekyll syndrome"? That is, they had one (1) batch of beads which worked, and they didn't realize until they'd used them up that there was something funny about that batch -- no other batch of beads ever behaved the same way, and nobody could figure out why.
That obviously wasn't something they would have expected or planned for. Patterson apparently thought he had the reproducibility problem licked cold. Had he known in advance what was going to happen with the beads the situation might have been handled differently.
As I recall, he also published his technique, including a description of the beads, but nobody else could make it work from his published documents. After Patterson ran out of the Magic Batch of Beads it became a lot clearer why other researches had been having trouble duplicating his work: it wasn't just that he was hiding some details.
Anyway, that's how I understood the tale. As always I'm happy to be corrected :-).
