This is a personal assessment of the issue, and basically nothing new. So you just can skip that, without loosing anything. LENR -for me- is easily the most challenging issue I encountered in my lifetime. Blacklight Power, Nanospire, Brillouin, Rossi, Defkalion, the Academics. There may be good reasons to reject any single of them, but in total the field is akin to the mythical elephant, where everyone touches part of the 'truth', and does not know about the 'whole'. Is there an elephant at all? Now we have two recent relevant developments: a) the students at MIT and the freshmen at Pirelli University, who -ahem- naively replicate the phenomenon. b) Defkalion (ignoring Rossi from my side, and others), who claim to have a commercial device. Theorists and our highly esteemed archivar/thinker Jed are mostly ignored by conventional 'wisdom'. --------- This poses substantial questions about the quest for truth, the scientific method, and my/our personal mental sanity. If eg I am 'insane', I cannot question the scientific method, or raise questions about the nature of 'truth'. On the other hand, if I consider myself 'sane',the scientific method is a relevant target, and 'truth' is an easy one, because we cannot know 'it' anyway. So it is all about the method of consensus-construction, may it be the scientific method of interpersonal verification, or a construction of beliefs.
Religion does not make anything ‘real’ in the physical sense. LENR is a physical phenomenon, ofcourse. It is seemingly challenged by the lack of interpersonal verification,or the lack of it. On the other hand the nonbelievers the holders of conventional wisdom refuse to accept 'fringe' evidence as 'real' evidence. Now what is 'evidence'? Interesting question, right? Cause and effect. Acutally we have at least THREE indeterminates in the equation: a) who is a person? not Your mentally disturbed everyday idiot, who sees UFOs every night b) what is a cause? This is a an infinite web of relationships. c) what is an evidence? This is what we see/measure. By what instruments? 'We' invent them. We are in a pityful diffuse situation here, not a mathematically clear one.. Now LENR is far above Homeopathy and such, right up to challenging the central scientific dogma of interpersonal verificiation. What does that mean? Just asking. Amen. ________________________________
