Redux.
At 06:25 PM 9/10/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Why bother selling to people who can't afford it?!? That's nuts.
Sell to people who are loaded with money and who really, really want
your product. Every major industrial corporation in the U.S., Japan
and Europe tunes into LENR-CANR from time to time. Within a few
months they will download thousands of copies of the NSF/EPRI
proceedings, for example. They control trillions of dollars in
capital. If you can convince them this kit you are describing exists
they will pay any amount of money for it.
Money is not the limiting factor. Credibility is. The resistance to
new ideas, and the fear of making a fool of oneself is.
Believability is, and that particular barrier was greatly reduced
thanks to CBS "60 Minutes." With the kind of kit you describe, these
barriers would be easily overcome.
It is as if you think you can make a machine that turns lead into
gold, but you are fretting that people will not have enough money to buy it.
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.
Well, it's a chicken and egg problem. I agree with Jed in this sense.
If we can do this it's all over.
(1) Make a kit that demonstrates low-energy nuclear reactions with
reliability. Ideally, 100%. But still possible with lower percentages
under some conditions.
(2) Convince those industrial buyers that it is worth testing.
The problem is that nobody has done the first, to my knowledge.
Rather, experiments have been done, and an investor has been lured
into the lab to see it working. And under those conditions, investors
know, the mine can be salted, deliberately or otherwise. Investors,
including governments, because of the huge potential returns, have,
in the past, put in huge sums to develop scaled-up effects. And those
efforts shut down, because results were "not what we expected."
The critics interpret that as meaning "there wasn't an effect," but
that's not how I read it. I read it as a finding that the effect
couldn't be scaled up for practical use, they realized that it was a
very difficult problem. Now, it's all insane, because a highly
speculative concept, from an engineering perspective, hot fusion, has
received huge long-term investment, but we all know why that
continues. Hint. It's spelled P O L I T I C S.
Some angel could fund the creation of the kits, and the one putting
up the money gets to make choices, unless the angel is very unusual.
Nothing wrong with it. Someone wants to make expensive kits, fine
with me. Why hasn't it happened, Jed? I have my ideas, actually
several possibilities, but you have the experience, you could
probably come up with something more accurate.
But I see a market that, I believe, exists now, it is simply a
different market. The science-interest market. It's a very small
market, locally. We are not going to open Home Cold Fusion Depot.
However, the world is big. One person in a million is a 300-customer
market in the U.S. alone. That is big enough to support a modest
company. Very modest, but doable. But, of course, as you note, if
such a kit exists there would be no problem selling it, once the
credibility exists, the buyers will exist, including buyers for whom
price is practically no object.
Sorry, but if someone who is influential has a grandkid who runs one
of these experiments, because their dad checked it out and it looked
like fun, there is then a toe in the door, and maybe more than a toe.
Whom do you trust more, an expert or your kids? You seem to think,
"the expert," but people aren't as stupid as you think. It just looks
that way when you can't penetrate the noise filters. Those filters
are necessary, and functional, they just sometimes get too tight, and
ways around them are needed. Social networking. In fact, social engineering.
The kits may be studied by experts, professionals. I'm sure they will
be. They are part of the market too. An angel may say, "I want the
experts to see this," and buy those fifty kits or hundreds of kits
and send them out. But the kits have to exist first, most likely,
unless there is an angel who is confident in the ability of some
company to produce the kits. That means confidence in the *process*
by which the kits will be designed and manufactured.
My sense is that, if cold fusion is real, if the literature isn't
distorted toward "belief," toward creating a false impression that
these experiments are reproducible, it can be done, and it can be
done fairly cheaply.
Sure, some experiments require phenomenally expensive equipment, and
many are so complex that they require high art as well. I wouldn't
suggest an Iwamura home elemental transmutation kit. But why hasn't
Iwamura convinced the "experts."? It's obvious, Jed. Replication is
*difficult* and if you don't believe that it's possible, you won't
bother. So what if there is some mystery out there, the world is full
of mysteries.
Once we can establish that *any* LENR effect -- aside from
muon-catalyzed fusion and certain destabilization of nuclei, known
effects -- is possible, that it actually happens, even at very low
level, the rest will follow. It's all been confused with "free
energy." Hence Garwin's thirst for two cups of tea, upscaled from one
cup before, a complete non sequitur.
Note that we may make kits that demonstrate LENR but the proof that
the effects are nuclear may not be utterly conclusive. It doesn't
have to be. If there is a kit that reliably produces the effects that
most of us consider nuclear, and the kit is mass-produced, the
additional necessary work will be done to make the conclusion
bulletproof. There are people who have the skills and knowledge and
resources to do it. But, right now, we can't hand them the effect to
study. Let's hand them the effect!
All we have to hand them now is a wide belief, among a narrow
collection of knowledgeable individuals, that there is this category
of experiments that, collectively, establish a nuclear effect. We
can't hand that to someone new and *functionally skeptical*. We tried
in 2004, and we got to maybe one-third of the panel. "Somewhat
convincing." That's all we can do without a clearly reproducible
experiment, and if it is as hard as you say to reproduce the
experiments, you know what will happen if independent experts try it
on their own. They will fail, usually, we will end up recruiting only
a few, who are then tagged as the most gullible.
So we won't allow them to fail. We will to the engineering for them,
they will see it for themselves. And then they will take the thing
apart and try to figure out how it works, how does it manage to
present this appearance of nuclear reactions? Where is the con or
mistake? They will have something specific to study, not a vast field
of literature, there is so much literature available already, too
much, in fact.
You know what happens when an expert is somehow motivated to study
specifics. Robert Duncan.
