Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: > In the wisdom of your years, how would you advise a lucky researcher who > has discovered the foundations of the LENR process to avoid the pitfalls of > others in the past? > I recommend they do what good scientists have always done, and what people such as McKubre, Miles and Storms have done:
* Use the best instruments you can. Get definitive results at a high s/n ratio. * Produce a large signal if you can. That is, a lot of heat. Within reason; Rossi goes too far. * Write a professional report, and publish it in a proceedings or journal if you can. * Invite scientists to visit, and demonstrate the experiment to them. Have them write independent evaluations. McKubre has done a great job at this. * "Shop around" your results. That is, use the reports and evaluations to get funding. For a university professor, this would be philanthropic funding I guess. For others, it might be corporate funding. I know many people who have expressed interest in funding these experiments. In some cases with strings attached. Dennis Cravens has done many of these things. Just not all of them. His reports were cited by Fleischmann, me and others as among the most important in the literature. He has credibility. Cravens is pretty good at calorimetry, so I expect he really does have 1 W. He just needs to prove it with proper calibrations, and many people will believe him. When Mel Miles did all of the above, exactly according to form, the Navy responded by demoting him from Distinguished Fellow of the Institute to stock room clerk. So it does not always work! Sometimes, instead of getting funding, you get a kick in the ass. But I think the situation has changed and this time, if someone would follow through, they might get funded. My point is, a person who can reliably produces 0.25 to 1 W should have proper funding to push this experiment forward. Even if he would prefer to work at home informally, I think that is irresponsible. Even dangerous. I do not think it is a good idea to do this on a shoestring, with hazardous materials that might cause health problems or death. Cravens and others like him are important, professional scientists. They should be treated as such. And they should act like it! He should be working at multi-million-dollar fully equipped laboratory, with people assisting him on aspects of the experiment he is not expert at, or he does not have time for. So should Rossi. This is important research, not a hobby or a game. I am sick of amateur cold fusion research, conducted in sloppy, cramped labs with cheap or homemade equipment. Rossi with his damn meter without the SD card just *irks * me to no end. Cravens or Rossi may say they prefer to work at home, informally. Of course they are free to do that. It is none of my business, and not up to me in any sense. But I think it is a senseless waste of talent, time and money. I am a strong believer in *doing things right*. I like to see professional presentations. I like to see organized reports with all the i's dotted and t's crossed, like the ones Mel Miles or Pam Boss write. Or McKubre, or Storms. I like NIST standard units, and tables and end notes properly labelled and formatted. Hey, I am programmer. We have a fetish for details. Also, let's see computer data properly collected. I'll bet NI would be willing to give Cravens or Rossi a zillion dollars worth of the best equipment, for the asking. You can say that stuff is just the outward appearance and we should look deeper at the real quality of the report. Okay, yeah, I get it. But it * pains* me to see sloppy, half-baked papers, especially from brilliant people such as Arata! The guy makes up fruitcake words and does ass-backwards calorimetry. Why can't he hire someone to do it right?!? He is one of the most famous scientists in Japan. They named a building after him at a national university for crying out loud. So why does he publish papers that would not pass a high school science class?! It boggles the mind. I know that scientists looking at this field see that kind of thing and dismiss the results. I hear that from them all the time. Frankly, some of Dennis Cravens' papers are unprofessional in presentation. Lacking in detail. Not as bad as Arata by any means, but they could be better. Some are really great, as I said. The only sloppy lab I ever saw that knocked my socks off was Ed Storms' basement. Ed is a consummate professional who can make beautiful, precision equipment anywhere, so where ever he wants to do it is fine with me. Others, I think, should go for a more professional setting. - Jed
