Edmund Storms <[email protected]> wrote: People seem to be missing the essential issue here. A theory gives > information about a process or phenomenon that is required to make it > happen on demand. A process cannot be believed or even studied unless it > can be made to occur on demand. So far, LENR occurs occasionally by chance > or because a recipe has been discovered by trial and error. >
Exactly right. All premodern technology was developed by trial and error, without theory. That is why progress was so slow. They often made drastic mistakes, Buildings collapsed and ships sank. Many machines, buildings, ships and other technology was sub-optimal because they did not understand the principles. They over-engineered things, using more stone than was needed to hold up a building. They settled on bad designs with no way to improve them. They had to be very conservative because they were working in the dark. They could not risk trying new building materials. Still, they did manage to build things such as Roman aqueducts, and make materials such as Damascus steel. > The successful recipes have not been made generally available so that > people who want to study the effect cannot. > That is not quite true. I recommend the use of hydrogen filter palladium, and the techniques described here: Cravens, D. *Factors Affecting Success Rate of Heat Generation in CF Cells*. in *Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion*. 1993. Lahaina, Maui: Electric Power Research Institute 3412 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304. Storms, E., *How to produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect*. Fusion Technol., 1996. *29*: p. 261. > Even Edison could not get people to believe the light bulb was possible > until he was able to make one that worked every time long enough for > someone to see it operate. > Actually, many educated people knew that incandescent lights in vacuum were possible. Lights were exhibited in the 1850s, in Boston and elsewhere. People did not believe two of Edison's claims: 1. That he could "subdivide" lights (run them electrically in parallel, not in series). 2. That he could make them last longer than 10 hours or so. The reason they did not believe him, at first, was because he was lying. He could not do these things. He just said he could. - Jed
