Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
. . . I suggested infrared imaging and Ed said maybe you could get a camera to do it for $10,000 (actually the first number he gave was higher). But what I had in mind wasn't a full blown industrial camera, but a kludged setup using a night vision device and lenses, fixed focus.
I have seen people do things like this. It seldom works out well. Here is the sort of thing that happens:
The camera turns out to be harder than you think. You get sidetracked on this task, maybe for weeks, maybe months. Some people forget what they intended to do in the first place and end up making one camera, or calorimeter, or mass spectometer after another without doing any cold fusion experiments.
The camera never works quite right. Or it turns out to be inflexible and not quite what you need. This is an education. You learn a lot more about IR cameras than anyone else in the field. Most of all, you learn why commercial IR cameras cost $10,000 (or whatever they cost nowadays) and why they are worth it. An education yes, but expensive and time consuming. As Franklin says experience is a dear teacher but a fool will learn at no other.
The camera works okay after all, but other people do not believe it. They doubt that a kludged instrument is reliable and accurate. You will gain no credibility and they ignore you and your results. Actually, this will be the outcome for any experiment performed by an amateur outside of a professional laboratory. Unfortunately, professional scientists ignore such results, and -- perhaps even more unfortunately -- they are the people we must convince if this field is ever going to get anywhere. If we try to convince newspaper editors, government officials, the Obama administration, or any other non-scientists they will not understand the technical issues, and they will call in professional scientists and ask them to evaluate the results. Any result with a kludged camera in someone's house will automatically be given a failing grade. That's unfair but that's how things are. You need to deal with it.
I said in my book that we need to convince the public to support this research. I stand by that. We do need to convince the public. We also need to convince dozens or hundreds of professional scientists. Not all of them by any means. Not a majority. But a lot more than we have now. Public support alone is nut sufficient, and neither is a group of friendly, convinced scientists. We need both. Perhaps the purpose of this kit is to bring in more members of the public, but I doubt it will succeed in doing that. Most people will not know what to make of the results even if you can persuade them to try it. Also, by the way, most cold fusion experiments I have seen have been rather dangerous and I would not want people to try this at home.
- Jed
