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. 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
