William Beaty wrote:
I've come to see that there is one big thing that ruins these fields of amateur research. That thing is SECRECY. Every time amateurs think they've stumbled across something important, they go silent and treat their discovery as a Big Important Secret which must be preserved at all costs from the many enemies who want to steal it. This is garbage! It is a trap which leads to paranoid megalomania.
Howard Aiken said it best: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Aiken was a prof. at Harvard, and a computer pioneer.)
Anyone familiar with things such as cold fusion and the hydrosonic pump knows that there are dozens of anomalies lying around unexplored & ignored, including some that might solve our energy problems forever and earn the discoverer hundreds of billions of dollars. This was true in the past, as you see from the history of antiseptics and many other discoveries. Perhaps it is worse today, as I suggested in the previous message, but the problem has always been with us, and I am sure it is caused by human nature.
- Jed
