and Miles were able to reproduce it on their own. If the necessary skills and knowledge have been as obscure as those required for the pagd, it probably would have been lost.
While I agree with Jed about the basic point he is making, success in replicating the cold fusion claims is not based on skill, or at least not the kind of skill Jed is noting. Success has been based on chance creation of the nuclear active environment. No one, even today, knows what this environment looks like or how to create it on purpose.
Naturally, I agree that this kind of luck also played an important role. >From Mike's description such luck cannot happen with the PAGD. Making a PAGD is more like cloning a sheep -- you have to be an expert at every stage. Luck does not enter into it.
Still, there is a great deal of skill to doing CF, much of it perhaps unconscious. This skill helped set the stage for success by people like Bockris. They knew how to avoid many dumb mistakes that tripped up non-electrochemists before the "chance creation of the nuclear active environment" could even get underway.
The point is that if the PAGD effect is like cold fusion, it probably can be initiated several different ways, some of which can be found by the same kind of trial and error used by the Correas.
Unfortunately, it appears that is not the case, and the PAGD effect is more like cloning a sheep -- there are very narrow set of procedures, and they must all be done correctly. The cloning success rate, by the way, still runs from 0.1% to 3%, even today after tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on cloning research.. (See http://gslc.genetics.utah.edu/units/cloning/cloningrisks/). If cloning had provoked the same visceral opposition from scientists that cold fusion did, there is no chance it would have been replicated.
Replication is most impressive when the same effect can be produced several different ways, each of which show that the same variables are having the same effect on the outcome. Cold fusion has passed this test. The PAGD effect has not.
Perhaps that is not the fault of the PAGD effect, but rather a technical limitation. Perhaps there is only one reliable way to do it. If the effect is real and the technology is developed, additional methods are likely to be discovered. I believe there was only one proven method of making transistors in 1952 -- germanium junction devices, I think they were. It took weeks of intense hands-on training to teach that method to experts. Groups of engineers from outside companies who paid the patent fee attended classes at Bell Labs. By the mid-50s there were half a dozen other commercialized methods, some of them quite different from the original one.
Perhaps the PAGD demands the same kind of development path the transistor did, with a relatively tight set of technical specifications and a long list of dos and don'ts (which were published in a famous book known as "Mother Bell's Cookbook"). If so, that is most unfortunate, because Correa is the last person on earth who is qualified or likely to carry out the kind of program needed to ensure the success of this technology. His personality utterly precludes it. He has said he has no intention, in any case, because humanity does not deserve his invention -- or his genius. He seems to have put the PAGD aside now, and he is working on other projects that are based on what I would say are very peculiar notions about physics. If the PAGD as difficult to replicate as Mike indicates, we might as well write the whole thing off now.
If I were religious, and also inclined to believe claims such as the PAGD, I might wonder why God keeps putting such wonderful discoveries into the hands of such incorrigible people.
- Jed
