Jones and Nygel— I worked for a good engineer for 18 years. His moto was:
“It takes a $M worth of mistakes to make a good engineer,” and that was 50 years ago and applied to engineers and scientists, mostly engineers. The problem now-a-days is that the R&D persons foster mistakes, since more mistakes mean more money to make more mistakes. Look at the hot fusion R&D situation. I have found that the “devil is in the details.” The article Harry and Nigel have noted is right on IMHO. Mistakes AND null experiments should be made public by those who want to further technical development and all scientists to further understanding nature—this being the objective of authentic scientists. Keeping the natural laws secret is the role of paid investigators of natural laws or commercial pseudo- scientists so to speak. Bob Cook . Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2017 6:59 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Vo]:Why Scientists Must Share Their Failures The problem is that with many experiments, the result may clearly be not successful, or the experiment may have ended prematurely, but it is NOT a complete failure and has an avenues for improvement. Null results often point to avenues for improvement. Most often, this is not an "either/or" situation. Since the experimenter may want to see the work repeated, and may have plans to do it better himself, he is not willing to label it as a failure and in the end - may take the easy route ... which is doing nothing. "Doing nothing" preserves his ability to seek additional funding with improvements added, whereas a negative report makes continuation less likely. In LENR, this kind of thing can be seen clearly with the Parkhomov "replications" or lack thereof. There were many null results, but several of those appeared to have slight gain, or else some other redeeming value such as a radiation burst. Of course, the equivocal results could be written up in a way that does not prejudice future work - but then we are asking that the experimenter be both an expert in the Lab as well as an excellent writer. Nigel Dyer wrote: Excellent article. I have found that it is possible to find out some of the failures by going to conferences and talking with people. For every field there is usually someone who knows what has been done, and what has worked and what has not. The problem is that this is very hit and miss and the information is not very accessible, which is not a good way to do science Nigel H LV wrote: Why Scientists Must Share Their Failures We don’t ask people in other professions to do it, but it’s vital for speeding up progress in crucial areas of research from climate to medicine and public health By Ijad Madisch on April 13, 2017 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/why-scientists-must-share-their-failures/?WT.mc_id=SA_FB_POLE_BLOG
