At 10:06 AM 1/8/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
For my comment here:
<http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles-green-energy-czar/>http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles-green-energy-czar/
This has got to be against journalistic ethics at some level.
Are you a journalist? If so, not there!
You were right, and what you wrote was worth noticing. Likewise
Kowalski, by the way.
I don't necessarily agree that cold fusion is economically viable,
it's possible that huge sums could be spent with no commercial
result, but at this point, huge sums aren't needed; rather what is
needed is what Kowalski suggests, and what a DoE panel also
recommended in 2004, and even recommended back in 1989, though it was
half-hearted in 1989.
Targeted research to establish more firmly the basic science. Not
hundreds of millions of dollars.
There are, indeed, *possibilities*, and we won't know unless the
basic science is better characterized and known.
WTF is going on with palladium deuteride?
And how the hell did Vyosotskii find Fe-57 where it didn't belong, in
a bacterial culture? With a technique, Mossbauer spectroscopy, that
is absolutely positive as to the isotopic identification?
My guess is that there are lots of these anomalies that get blown off
as "must be experimental error" without any actual identification of
experimental error, and even when that presumption is quite unlikely.
And thus we may be missing countless opportunities to move beyond the
limitations of incomplete theory, and thus into new possibilities for
eventual commercial applications.
Cold fusion itself is beyond the point of reasonable doubt, though.
(But we can quibble about whether or not the nuclear reaction taking
place is "fusion.") But with good research support, we might have
collectively known about cold fusion by 1994 or 1995, instead of this
excruciatingly slow process that it took for the knowledge to start
to spread more widely. Not a massive program, just targeted grants to
fund basic scientific research in fields with a reasonable potential
for eventual application. Or even just for the pure science of it.
One never knows.
If you want to make a lot of money though, you'll wait for others to
support the basic research, and you will watch emerging research closely.
If I was out for making a lot of money, you can be sure I wouldn't be
fiddling with cold fusion. I'm out to make a *little*, commensurate
with my effort and investment. Peanuts. But pretty safe. I'm selling
science, known science, not energy pie in the sky, even though what
I'm doing might help that goal eventually by widening the circles of
awareness and making certain kinds of experiments much easier and
cheaper to set up. My efforts won't require Google grants, or any
grants, for that matter (though I've received some much appreciated
support, making my situation less precarious), but what follows might
get to that point.
