Edmund Storms wrote:
I asked a simple question. Exactly how would you promote the field?
I do not have a simple answer. I have a whole series of ideas that I
have proposed at various times to different researchers. They include
things such as enhanced Internet presentations, outreach programs to
encourage more participation in the field, and the kind of
cooperative experiments that Steve Krivit put together in the Galileo project.
Researchers have gone along with these ideas of mine, often
cheerfully. Some cooperated even though they did see the benefit.
Many contributed papers to LENR-CANR.org even though they did not
think it would be an effective way to reach the scientific community.
However, they have ignored many of these ideas. Perhaps the ideas
have no merit but I get the impression that the researchers do not
understand what I am trying to accomplish or why I am trying to do it.
I'm not interested in general ideas such as do what Obama did.
You should be interested in what Obama did. Anyone who wishes to
harness public opinion for any purpose should study Obama's methods.
He ran the most effective political campaign in modern history. He
made the best use of the Internet and community organizing
techniques. Whether he will be an effective president or not remains
to be seen, but he is a master at promoting ideas and rallying
support for a cause.
Anyone who wishes to promote a cause, whether it be political,
scientific, Wall Street reform, or anything else, should study
Obama's campaign carefully. No doubt many books will soon be
published about this campaign, but as it happens I know about it
already because I participated and I know several other people who did.
I'm interested in exploring a real, rational, and well focused plan.
I do not have such a plan, because researchers have expressed no
interest in it. Everything I do is rational and well focused. I am a
programmer.
You say you need the cooperation of researchers. You have all the
information known to the field.
No one has all of the information. That is the problem. Many people
even now do not realize that different sources of palladium produce
radically different results.
The most comprehensive description of the field is your book, but I
know a great many details about individual experiments that are not
described in this book. This book is nowhere near as detailed as
AT&T's "Transistor Technology." (I have not seen the whole book but I
have seen sections of it.) We need specific, detailed information
such as that presented recently by Castagna et al., Metallurgical
characterization of Pd electrodes employed in calorimetric
experiments under electrochemical deuterium loading:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CastagnaEmetallurgi.pdf
Only instead of 7 pages it has to be 70, or 700, with as much detail
as they can muster about every aspect of the metallurgy. This is only
a summary of what they know. We need detailed, step by step methods
from the NRL describing how they make their palladium-boron cathodes.
It would be nice if the ENEA and the NRL would agree to hand out
samples of these cathodes to 10 or 20 qualified researchers new to the field.
Detailed information has not even been published for various reasons
such as because the researchers have not got around to it, or they
are waiting to publish a paper in a major journal, or they do not
wish to share the information.
You would also have the cooperation of many researchers if the plan
looks good.
I do not think so. So far they have expressed no interest in
preliminary plans and trial balloons of this nature.
You need to realize that many of the researches do have valid points
even if they differ with how you interpret the situation.
I realize that. As I said, there are intellectual property
limitations. There are bureaucratic rules about who ENEA can
cooperate with. However I think that people who are lukewarm to
political efforts fail to realize how dire the situation is, or how
likely it is that they and their work will be forgotten. I am not
talking about science here, but politics, and some of these
researchers fail to grasp the political aspects of this situation.
Also -- let's face it -- some researchers are comfortably ensconced
in academic jobs and have no motivation to help others compete with
them. That's what some of them have told me.
We are not all ignorant of the situation and the need for better promotion.
No one is completely ignorant of that. Many of these people are far
more experienced in academic politics and I am, needless to say. But
I do not think that many people in this field know as much about
promotion and public opinion as I do. It happens that I do know about
these subjects because I have examined a wide variety of case studies, such as:
Obama's campaign techniques;
Cringley's books about the rise of personal computer business;
How Amazon.com captured a large share of the book market;
Battelle's study of Google;
Yergin's study of the oil industry;
The promotion and funding of the Transcontinental Railroad;
and so on . . .
Also, I have detailed knowledge of who reads cold fusion papers, and
which papers they are interested in.
Even though I have this specialized knowledge of business history and
number of people who read the Beaudette book online versus the number
who read it from Amazon.com, and so on, and so forth, this is not
like knowing the laws of chemistry or how to program in Pascal. It
does not allow me to make definite conclusions and surefire
predictions. It is not as if I can sit down and hammer out a 20-point
plan that is 80% likely to work, and that can be subjected to
benchmarks at each stage, like a programming project. At best, such
knowledge gives me some ideas about what might work, and some
cautions about what is likely to backfire. The first stumbling block
is that I can do nothing without the assent, support and some degree
of effort on the part of the researchers. As you know, getting them
to do anything is like herding cats.
- Jed
