Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Reasonable, I'd say, if the 10W experiment looked like it had a prayer of > being scalable. 10 W would already be a significant scale up, by a factor of ~10. If it worked I am sure any larger size would work. Also, I know of no reason to think it would not scale up. Kitamura has already scaled up substantially. > If not, it would still be worth substantial continued support, depending on > such things as the economics. Substantial compared to what? Compared to what it costs to develop a new shade of lipstick or to build yet another marginal shopping mall in an overcrowded market in Atlanta? > If one needs $100,000 worth of palladium to generate 10 W, it may be > striking as a phenomenon, but not as a commercial product. The nanoparticle approach uses less palladium than others. A nanoparticle cold fusion device capable of practical levels of energy generation would use no more palladium than an automobile catalytic converter. > The priority at first should be exploring the science, WTF is happening in > there? Without knowing, speculating about commercial applications is just > that: speculating. Not engineering. I think it is far beyond speculation. Also, many technologies in the past were developed without a theoretical basis. I recently wrote to a correspondent about this: "Other technological revolutions in the past got underway and made tremendous progress before a theoretical understanding was developed. That has not happened often since 1945, but it is not out of the question. Look at telegraphy, railroads, heat engines and incandescent lights. The thermodynamics of heat engines (steam and internal combustion) was not understood before 1870, and not fully understood until around 1910, but tremendous progress was made before that. Melich says that much of nuclear engineering and solid state and catalytic effects is still understood only as an empirical model, not a theory. Medicine is largely empirical. 'Medical science' is practically an oxymoron . . . The importance of theory is overrated in the modern era, in my opinion." - Jed
