Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote: No, it is pro-forma, Japanese style. It is what you say before you are >> forced to be uncivil. >> > > One is never "forced" to be uncivil. >
I cannot describe the facts of the matter without showing that your assertions are ignorant nonsense. Your statements violate the principles of science described in junior high school introductory textbooks, such as the primacy of experiments over theory, and the fact that we do not need a theory to be sure that a phenomenon is real. You are not the only one who makes these mistakes. Huizenga's statements are wrong on so many levels, and they are so ignorant, they are appalling. The main conclusion in his book is breathtaking. See: http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/293wikipedia.html > "Far closer" was you assertion, not mine. So, your assertion really is "it > could be closer." > I meant far closer than plasma fusion or clean coal. The remaining technical problems in cold fusion could be fixed if we had the funding spent on these fields in one week. That is not a sure thing. There can never be a sure thing in research. But most researchers expect that is the case, and so do I, and the researchers & I know a lot about this, so our guess is better than yours. > Great. When can I heat my house with one? That's what I'm getting at: > Practical application. > The answer depends on politics. I cannot predict if, or when, sufficient money will be made available for this research. Cold fusion may never be funded, in which case it will never come to fruition. I can describe the technical problems and the likely solutions to them. I can make a reasonable guess about scientific or engineering issues. But no one can say when people will come to their senses and stop denying experimentally proven facts. That should have happened in 1990. Who can say how much longer it will take?!? Human irrationality is not predictable. Look at the history of wars, or the decades of opposition to other scientific breakthroughs such as Helicobacter pylori. > > The only thing lacking in cold fusion is control over the reaction. If we >> had that, we could easily make prototype devices. >> > > But we don't have that so we don't have prototypes. > Ah but there are many promising experiments that may well give us control. The problem seems solvable. Unfortunately, there is no funding to do these experiments. But you have consistently argued that cold fusion *will* have a > world-changing payoff ... you're not in it just for the science, you're in > it for the payoff. > No, I have not argued that. I have said that if it is funded, and if we are fortunate enough to have a breakthrough, THEN it will be world-changing. I have shown that it has already achieved sufficiently high temperatures and power density for practical applications. Funding is necessary but not sufficient. Funding along cannot guarantee success. Cancer research has been funded lavishly for decades, but unfortunately, public health epidemiology shows that there has been no measurable decrease in mortality rates from cancer. The diagnosis is made sooner, but the prognosis has not improved, and longevity has not increased. (Farley and Cohen) In the case of cold fusion, phenomena have been observed that are believed > to be the result of a novel physical process. > Not believed, *proved* beyond any doubt. Proved with as much certainty as anything in science can be proved. The tritium and heat prove it. No chemical process can generate tritium. No one has been able to explain what causes the phenomena . . . > You do not need to explain something to prove that it exists. Please try to understand that! > and no one has been able to produce a device that is useful that uses > whatever the phenomena is. > Because there is no funding. We have often made technology work without a theory. > What did Peter originally ask? "when will enter LENR such lists as > [Greatest Inventions: 2012 and 1913 Editions]?" My answer was "When there > is a testable theory or a demonstrably practical device." > You are wrong. Countless important inventions could not be explained by theory at first. Examples include radioactivity in 1898, airplanes in 1908, and HTSC today. - Jed
