Mitchell Swartz wrote:
Wrong.
Cold fusion science and engineering should be taught to undergraduates.
Perhaps it should, but that is not what I said. I said it should not be in
"in a high school or undergraduate textbook." Textbooks should include
claims that are well understood, uncontroversial, and unchanging. There is
still considerable controversy and confusion even within the ranks of cold
fusion researchers. Any treatment of cold fusion would soon be dated. I
would not teach it in high school. If it is taught to undergraduates I
would recommend original source materials.
Wrong.
It would be more accurate to say "I disagree," since this is a matter of
opinion, and a political question.
There SHOULD be a multi-billion dollar Manhattan Project to further
develop the most successful cold fusion technologies.
My guess is that this would cause more harm than good. Imagine how things
would have turned out if the Japanese NEDO project had been scaled up to
the size of the US Star Wars initiative. Instead of wasting $10 million (or
whatever the final amount was), they would have wasted $100 billion. It
would have been the absolute, final, indisputable nail in the coffin.
No one should doubt that governments can waste hundreds of billions on
research projects of this nature. Look at Star Wars! Look at post-9/11
homeland defense. They still cannot make 2-way radios work.
Wrong.
Cold fusion science and technology IS being made practical today --
and will augment energy resources in the future.
As Ed Storms said, I know of no evidence that cold fusion technology is
being made practical today. Perhaps I have overlooked something. Perhaps
Swartz himself has such evidence, but he has not revealed it to me.
As I said before, if the iESi claims are true, that would be practical. But
I have seen no details, no proof, and no replications of these claims.
Many of the claims made at ICCF conferences (and especially in the
Fusion Technology peer-reviewed
papers) are quite strong and many have been replicated and/or shown to
be reproducible . . .
That's true. Many are strong. Many others are weak, and still others have
not been independently tested so we have no idea where they stand.
- and developed into solid engineering principles.
That is not true as far as I know. We have strong, high Sigma reproducible
physical effects in the laboratory, but that is million miles away from
"solid engineering." No one disputes that high temperature
superconductivity and cloning are strong and reproducible scientific
claims, some worthy of Nobel prizes. Yet despite billions of dollars of R&D
neither is ready to be commercialized.
Final comment: Suppression of science is wrong - from Galileo to today.
Agreed. On the other hand, suppression of dangerous pseudoscience, such as
the claim that AIDS is not caused by HIV, is okay. I consider it ethical to
try to prevent the publication of such ideas by protesting and bringing
pressure on responsible newspapers and magazines. However this seldom
works, and sometimes it ends up promoting the idea instead of quashing it.
So I think it is usually better to ignore pseudoscience.
- Jed
