At 03:38 PM 2/24/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I think one of the lessons of Rossi's success so far is that researchers should aim to produce a larger reaction, if they can. 12 kW is too large in some ways. But I suppose a typical experiment produces a fraction of a watt. 10 W or more would be more persuasive. It has emotional appeal. It shows that you can, in principle, scale up. The appeal is not fully rational, but I think it might garner more interest and financial support.
Well, Jed, that depends on what you want to do. If you want to impress people, sure. But if you try to scale up a method before you have been able to stabilize it, so that results are not chaotic, you might scale up, all right, scale up to seriously dead.
A solid approach will be solid when small. And small is much cheaper, and much safer.
Sure, when you have something that works, cleanly and reliably, then you can scale up. but trying to scale up to start, no. Scale down, in fact, and run lots of experiments.
