PHILIP WINESTONE wrote:
My own take on energy - I'm in the Cold Fusion arena, at least as a
support person - is to bring Cold Fusion to the people; the real people . . .
I wrote something similar in the Introduction to my book, quoting
Sir. H. C. Beaver: "on public opinion, and on it alone, finally rests
the issue." I said: "The public will not act until we convince it
that cold fusion is worth funding."
. . . that is, who often have an intuitive wisdom far greater than
the overly educated . .
No one is overly educated. Compared to how people will be in 1000
years, we are all ignorant savages, barely removed from cavemen.
Intuition has its uses, but as Clarke's third law has it: Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In
1800, no intuition, however powerful, could have envisioned things
such as nuclear power, cold fusion, computers, or mass spectroscopy
of distant stars and planets. A few highly educated people might
barely have imagined the telegraph, and many more saw the possibility
of railroads, but their vision would have owed more to educated logic
than intuition. Even today, most people cannot imagine that cold
fusion exists. Their problem is not that they lack intuition; what
they lack is rigorous, evidenced-based, experimental hard science.
They depend too much on imagination, and not enough on textbook science.
The two great visionaries of the distant past -- Roger Bacon and
Francis Bacon -- both based their ideas on clear thinking and
extrapolation, not intuition.
. Bring Cold Fusion to the people in the form of solid, practical
applications, and they'll buy into it.
ANYONE would buy into cold fusion if we had solid, practical
application! The problem is how to get from where we are now to those
practical applications. The only people who have contributed to cold
fusion, and the only ones who doing anything to move it along now,
are the elite, highly educated mainstream research scientists such as
Storms, Miles, Miley, Fleischmann, Oriani, McKubre, Boss, Szpak,
Mizuno and so on.
Do NOT bring cold fusion to the government or academia, for some
kind of approval (or funding), because both will (and have) talk it to death.
The discovery of cold fusion in the 1980s, and every scrap of
progress that has been made in the field since then, has all been
done at government and academic institutions (universities and
national labs), plus a small number of corporate labs, such as Amoco,
Mitsubishi, and the Everready Battery Co. There has no been
contribution from members of the general public, and not a bit of
political support either, I am sorry to say.
Cold fusion cannot be developed at home by ordinary folks any more
than a new type of semiconductor chip could be. It calls for
expensive, high-tech equipment operated by experts.
- Jed
- Re: [Vo]:Read posts before replying, PLEASE Jed Rothwell
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