David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: Jed, you are describing a gentleman that has supreme confidence in his > knowledge of physics and believes that there can be nothing new under the > sun.
That is why they put him in charge of the ERAB panel. The DoE is run by people like him. They are pretty good at incremental improvements to existing technology, but useless for anything else. That is why the plasma fusion project has gone on for 60 years without making any progress. We are no closer to plasma fusion power reactors than we were in 1950. > Gibbs on the other hand should not be blamed too severely. > It is probably not his fault. He does not understand the difference between a claim and a theory. He does not understand what EPRI meant, or why Gerischer was so sure cold fusion is real. I expect he has talked to theoretical physicists and they have told him "we will not believe this until we see a nuclear theory that we agree is true." They have said that to me countless times. Needless to say, that is a violation of the scientific method, but these people never learned the scientific method. In his case, it would be a major embarrassment to his career if he went > out on a limb and declared LENR as real and later was found to be in error. > I think he should report the facts about cold fusion and leave it at that. But he would get in trouble for doing that. > Do you think that the investment world is frozen in a similar manner when > new technologies emerge? > Only with regard to energy, and only because the DoE has tremendous influence. It has stifled research in the U.S., Japan and Europe. There is no Federal Department of Computing. If there was one, we would still be using vacuum tube computers. Uncle Sam did invent the Internet, but that was an incremental improvement using existing technology, which is the kind of thing Federal researchers excel at doing. NASA's mismanagement of the Hubble went to surrealistic extremes. Read the book "Hubble Wars" for details. All because of academic politics. > Who is willing to be the first brave guy to take that step into the > unknown and risk being labeled stupid? > Stupid is the least they will call you. Any scientist or science journalist who gets involved with cold fusion will be called "the chicken nugget and fries guy" at McDonald's. It is career suicide to talk about cold fusion. You are allowed to write the kind of slop Gibbs, Lemonick, Sci. Am. and others have published: 5 parts rumor, 5 parts technical error, 1 part fact. - Jed
