Man on Bridges wrote:
I seem to recall that Rossi mentioned he had a retired elderly
engineer working for him building these reactors.
Not the reactors, the nickel catalyst powder.
I sure hope he has another source by now!
Inventors and discoverers are hostage to their suppliers and co-workers.
Rossi's nightmare experiences with thermoelectric chips illustrates
this. He cannot do everything himself. He has to depend on other
people's skills, and these other people sometimes do not know how to
reproduce their own work. Thus, Rossi worked for years on thermoelectric
chips and then saw all the work go for nothing because it turned out
others cannot do what he hoped they could do -- and he does not have the
skills to do it all himself, any more than Edison could have mastered
glass-blowing enough to invent the light bulb. Edison was forced to
depend on Bohm, and Bohm often failed.
Jones Beene imagines Rossi wasted years and dollars doing this for some
nefarious reason. Outside of hot fusion, I have never met a scientist or
inventor who works just to earn the grant money. They do R&D in order to
accomplish a result -- to make a product. Especially for an inventor,
the grant money is a pittance compared to the profit if they succeed.
They often fail, but it is never because they want to rip off the grant
agency. It is because nature does not cooperate, and they do not know
enough to succeed. It is never their intention to fail. Rossi has failed
many times, of course. Any real inventor or scientist who does work of
consequence will have failed far more often than he succeeded.
- Jed
