Mark Gibbs <[email protected]> wrote: but it raises the question if/when will enter LENR such lists? >> > > When there is a testable theory or a demonstrably practical device. > > So far, LENR is, to be perhaps somewhat poetic, no more than a > willow-the-wisp ... >
I am sorry to be abrasive, but this is ignorant nonsense. Cold fusion is far closer to being a practical device than things like plasma fusion or HTSC, and -- needless to say -- the Top Quark and the Higgs boson will never have any practical use. Yet no journalist would say these are "will-o-the-wisp" findings. Everyone knows they are real, even though they are of no practical use. Nearly every breakthrough in the history of science and technology has gone through a long period of gestation as a useless laboratory curiosity. Sometimes this lasts for years, sometimes for decades. You see this in the history of steam engines, telegraphy, photography, electric motors, incandescent lighting, Diesel engines, aviation, rocketry, DNA, computers, the laser, and countless others. Oersted demonstrated the principle of induction and electromagnets in 1820. Electric telegraphs had to wait for Henry to improve the electromagnet. Edison made the first practical electric motors in 1880. It took biologists 50 years to figure out that the genome is in nucleic acid, and not protein. *Fifty years*! The Curies discovered radioactivity in 1898. The first practical use of this was in the atomic bomb in 1945, and the first commercial nuclear reactor was made in 1950. If people had ignored or dismissed these subjects because they were unfinished scientific research, we would still be living with 18th century technology. It is the height of arrogance, and *gross ignorance of history*, to dismiss a laboratory finding because it seems to have no immediate, short-term practical use. Frankly, it is incredible to me that a science journalist such as Gibbs does not realize this. Have you read *nothing* about history?!? - Jed
