I wrote:
> Why are Rossi and Levi hiding the notebook-files? > > > The make and model of the flowmeter. I asked them several times and they > ignored me. > I thought that said "WHAT are Rossi and Levi hiding . . ." The answer is: they are hiding the type of flowmeter. As to WHY they are "hiding" it I am pretty sure that is the same reason most professors "hide" stuff. Have you ever looked for something in a professor's lab? You will find it under a pile of papers, books, sample materials, dirty dishes and unfinished sandwiches. Professors will promise to send me a paper, and then I remind them months later, and again months later, and it drags on for years. They take on an assignment and they finish it 6 months to never after the due date. If I had known that professors tend to be this way when I was in college, I might have felt differently about deadlines. Then again it might have taken me 20 years to graduate on their timetables. For the record, Edison was even messier than your average professor. Ed Storms reports that when go-getter know-it-all directors come to National Laboratories from private industry or corporate front offices, they look around at the chaos and broken equipment and say: "This place is a pigsty! I want this stuff cleaned up. Throw away that 20-year old equipment!" So they clean up, and progress comes to a half for the next several years, since researchers can no longer scrounge or salvage old parts for experiments. There is a good reason why hands-on experimental researchers keep all that junk around. Also, something that apparently did not occur to Krivit is that when you are assembling plumbing, you need plumbing tools. It makes no difference whether the plumbing in for your kitchen sink, an eCat, a Tokamak reactor or the Fukushima nuclear reactor. Plumbing is plumbing and it calls for pipe wrenches. What else? Most of an experimental apparatus is made of ordinary stuff. - Jed
