Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I'm getting different reports. Some techniques are obviously
extremely difficult. Codep doesn't appear to be, the Galileo project
proved that it was within reach.
I do not know enough about the Galileo project or co-dep to judge,
but I can see that the project is not continuing and the number of
people doing the experiment is not expanding, so by that metric it
has not succeeded. I do not think the project was intended to give
people the ability to do this without hands-on training. That was not
a project goal.
Think of the Galileo project as the first step in an engineering
journel. What's the next step, Jed?
I wouldn't know about this technique.
I will then call some of these venture capitalists who have been
hounding me and we'll get you tons of money.
Maybe. Tons of money for what? To develop science fair kits?
No. They want reliable excess heat. They have no use for neutrons,
kids, or science fairs.
Sure. It is roughly as difficult as building an automobile in 1908,
just before the Model T went on sale.
I'm going to say, horseshit. I think that if I had the funding
necessary to build an automobile (analogously to that time), I'd be
set on these kits.
I suggest you read books about Henry Ford did what Charles E. Taylor
did. I should get the title of the book I have at home about Taylor.
It took considerable skill to make your automobile back then,
especially when you started by making an engine. Of course those
engines were primitive.
Jed, your account of how difficult it is to replicate "cold fusion
experiments" would be true for Fleischmann-type cells, probably,
though I do assume it is easier now than in 1985-1989! Or 1990, for
that matter.
You have it backward. Charles Taylor's 1903 engine was easy to make;
the ones he and the Wrights were making a few years later were much
harder, but much better. The engines Ford began mass-producing in
1908 were better still and far beyond the capabilities of a single
mechanic at a workbench in a bicycle store.
It was easy to do cold fusion experiments in 1989 and it is much
harder now. Nowadays people know how to do them and there is a long
checklist of things you must accomplish and verify, so it is hard. In
1989 it was a shot in the dark that wasn't hard to do, but it usually
failed. As Ed Storms says it was like randomly selecting pieces of
gravel from your driveway to look for the semiconductor effect. To
take an actual similar example from the history of semiconductors:
"Shockley was a theoretician, not an experimentalist. One day in
1940, a scientist named Wooldridge found him fiddling around in the
lab with a piece of oxidized copper, which 'had apparently been cut
out of some very old copper back porch screen with very dull
scissors.' Shockley was trying to position wires so they would barely
touch the green oxide coating. He hoped to adjust the voltage applied
to the mesh to control the current flow. In other words, he was
trying to make a crude transistor. Wooldridge later wrote: 'so here
he had the three elements of a transistor, these two wires and the
copper screen. Of course, he was orders of magnitude away from
anything that would work!'"
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtransistor.pdf
It was easy to cut some old copper screen with scissors and do a
rudimentary experiment. It was much harder to make an actual working
semiconductor 8 years later.
But I'm leaning a bit on He Jing-Tang. He claims that some groups
have been getting 100%. Okay. How did they do it?
By assembling millions of dollars of equipment and paying experts who
have decades of experience.
Look, you are right. It's worth billions of dollars at 1W reliable
output. But .... why hasn't this been built, if it is worth so much?
Well I don't know anyone who can make one that works reliably, except
perhaps Arata and that has not yet been demonstrated. The reason why
people have not spent the money to make them reliable is because of
political opposition from academic rivals. Read the Beaudette book.
Also because it would probably cost $100 million, or maybe $300
million depending on which expert you ask. IMRA (Toyota) spent tens
of millions and made significant progress but the data is locked away
somewhere at Johnson Matthey.
No, I have in mind a total shoestring project, self-funded, bootstrapping.
I do not believe such a thing is possible, because I have seen
similar attempts fail, and because I do not believe that anyone is
capable of reducing art to science at this stage of development. But good luck!
It may be that you can pull this off. I cannot judge. I have seen
many people claim they can do this in the past. They have all
failed, but that does not mean you will fail. Go ahead and try, and
more power to you. I suggest you visit experiments.
I'm calling your bluff, Jed, if it's a bluff. Who tried it? What
happened? Exactly what happened?
Don't be silly. I never bluff. Long-time readers of this list and
people familiar with the history of the field will know that I mean
people such as Mallove, Tinsley, Redding and Krivit (the Galileo
project, which was not a failure, but did not trigger a continuing
success either, as I said). There have been others whose names I do
not recall. Kits have been discussed and attempted many times. One of
these times, a kit might actually work.
One of the ways to succeed where others failed is to (1) try new
ideas, but (2) also pay very close attention to what failed, how,
and, if possible, why.
They failed for lack of knowledge, money and gumption, in that order.
Most of all they -- and other defunct R&D -- failed for the reasons
described by Wilbur Wright, in Appendix A here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf
- Jed
