John Coviello writes: "Cold fusion is going to have to develop commercially outside the U.S. for obvious and unfortunate reasons. It will be rather amusing when cold fusion commercial devices are developed and the stogy old American physics community finally comes around to the reality of this technology."
Actually, this is a typical historic pattern of development. Most radically new technology is developed in nations or regions peripheral to big, powerful nations. The best example is the British industrial revolution. Most of the technology, the economic philosophy and the other underlying ideas behind it were developed and sustained in Scotland, not England. People on the periphery of a powerful civilization are ideally placed to develop new ideas because they "hungry" and they have less to lose (they have fewer reasons to maintain the status quo), but they are also close enough to centers of power and communication to keep up with the latest developments. Another well known example was the initial development of aviation in Dayton, OH, instead of somewhere like New York or Paris, France. - Jed
