Jed Rothwell wrote:
John Coviello wrote:
My greatest fear vis a vis cold fusion is that it will die when the
researchers all die.
That's not going to happen Jed. If cold fusion is indeed a real and
viable scientific discovery, the death of researchers will not end its
development. Perhaps their deaths will slow cold fusion research down,
but if something is real in nature it will eventually be developed by
someone. The only way cold fusion will totally die is if it has been
an artifact all along, gross experimental error, noise.
How do you know that? People often say things like: "Science always
works in the end; valuable data is never truly lost." In other fields,
valuable data and important techniques are lost all the time. I know of
examples in computer programming, shipbuilding, metallurgy and many
other fields. Programming techniques which were well known in the 1970s
are unheard of today. I purchased a commercial program a couple years
ago to accomplish one of the tasks at LENR-CANR.org. It took 10 minutes
to execute. I wrote an old-fashioned Pascal program that ran in 20
seconds and did a better job.
In his latest book, Kenneth Deffeyes wrote: "the number of active
exploration geologists in petroleum plus mining in the world is a few
thousand, probably fewer than 10,000.
There is a population limit below which an isolated community tends to
become decadent, and lose information as time goes by rather than
gaining it. I don't know what the number is but 10,000 sounds 'way less
than it.
There is, I believe, evidence that at least some small isolated island
societies have gone extinct as a result of intellectual decadence
eventually costing them the basic skills needed to survive (no
references, sorry).
Textbooks can hopefully make a difference here, but as you point out
they don't capture on-the-job knowledge, which can be a major part of
what is known in some disciplines.
Almost all the students with a
natural science and today are majoring in environmental studies or
ecology. The problem involves more than just the colleges and
universities. Most of us learned an enormous amount on the job from our
older colleagues, skilled and experienced geologists. When those threads
are broken, there is a permanent loss." "Beyond Oil," p. 179
Why should experimental science be different from these other fields?
- Jed
