H LV <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: When the electric battery was first discovered in the early 1800s and > little was known about the phenomena, to some people it seemed like it > could become the next great source of energy. I think people should temper > their commercial and scientific expectations when faced with the mystery of > a new phenomena. Harry >
I think we now know enough about cold fusion to make informed speculation about it. If the recent Mizuno experiment can be replicated, I think it proves beyond question that the effect can be scaled up and made into a commercially useful source of energy. It is only a matter of engineering. It also shows that there is enough palladium in the world to generate all the energy we need. I should explain that Mizuno has projected that much higher power density is possible. We now know the reaction can occur at high temperatures and high power density, and that it can be controlled at least as well as a burning pile of coal or a fission reactor core. When I wrote my book, I did not know whether cold fusion would ever become a useful source of energy, or even whether it was possible to make it practical. The book is predicated on the assumption that it can be made practical, but that was speculation. I think we now know for sure that it can be. It only has to be proved once, with one experiment, since the effect itself has been widely replicated and there is no doubt it exists. It is possible there is such strong political opposition to cold fusion it will never be developed. However we now know that it can be. It is true that people have sometimes overestimated the potential of new technology, but I think more often they have underestimated it. People have often underestimated by a gigantic margin. Some of these people were experts who should have known better. In the 1970s the top managers at DEC and other companies thought that microcomputers would never amount to much. In the late 1990s, Paul Krugman thought that the Internet was not important. Here is my favorite quote from an expert in transportation who should have known better: Eighty-five percent of the horse-drawn vehicle industry of the country is untouched by the automobile. In proof of the foregoing permit me to say that in 1906-7, and coincident with an enormous demand for automobiles, the demand for buggies reached the highest tide of its history. The man who predicts the downfall of the automobile is a fool; the man who denies its great necessity and general adoption for many uses is a bigger fool; and the man who predicts the general annihilation of the horse and his vehicle is the greatest fool of all. - The keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the National Association of Carriage Builders in 1908, the year that Ford introduced the Model T >From D. H. Sanders, "Computers in Business, An Introduction" (1968)
