Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote: If you're looking for interesting CF papers, and if you're looking for > papers that show evidence that the researchers knew what they were doing, > you might take a look at this honker . . . >
A direct link: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIdevelopmen.pdf > It's over 300 pages, and you may find it less than conclusive, but it's a > fascinating document, which makes it painfully clear just how difficult > Pd/D CF experiments really are. > Yup. This is one of the best descriptions of research I know of, in any field. > (One obvious overwhelming conclusion is that Pd/D cells are 'way too > touchy to be anything more than a curiosity, regardless of how "real" the > phenomenon may be.) > That seems likely to me, but sometimes with a lot of money you can make touchy technology robust. Semiconductors and color televisions, for example. > McKubre, the lead author, is clearly the complete opposite of Rossi. They > shouldn't even be compared, frankly. > They are indeed polar opposites. But bear in mind that McKubre is impressed by Rossi. Because he knows an expert who attended some of the tests, he is convinced that Rossi's results are real. He thinks that Rossi is deliberately obfuscating his results for business reasons. I agree that is likely. It is also Rossi's nature to obfuscate things. There have been many superb scientists and engineers like that. Arata is an example. As I've pointed out before, Harrison, who invented the chronometer, was one of the best examples. Perhaps he had to be this way. What he was trying to accomplish was inherently complicated. It was a tremendous challenge given the tools of the day. The only way to do it was to use indirect means and convoluted methods. It was similar to making a supercomputer in the 1950s and 60s. His personality happened to be an ideal fit to this problem. He took decades and he never did it the easy way when some clever but difficult method was available. His love of intricacy and complexity also meant he had difficulty communicating with others, and simplifying the design. Other people simplified the design, and made the thing practical, as he himself recognized. (See: http://www.rmg.co.uk/harrison http://www.rmg.co.uk/server/show/conMediaFile.2757 Harrison's friend "reduced this design to practice" in the form of a pocket watch! He gave the watch to Harrison.) Convoluted techniques were common in computer programming in the 1970s because of hardware limitations such as 4 kB RAM. There were programmers who loved the challenge and came up with ingenious methods of overcoming these limits. Their programs were difficult to understand and impossible to maintain, yet they were works of genius. (By the way, I did not love the challenge of making programs work in 4 kB, but I did meet it.) - Jed
