On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 2:04 PM, John Franks <[email protected]> wrote:
LENR has been going on for years and I and others just can't see how you can > bring nucleons within 10s of fermi of each other to fuse, lattice or no > lattice. > About twenty four years, if Paneth and Peters aren't considered. Perhaps sufficient screening can bring nucleons within 10s of fermis of one another. Keep in mind that a solid has very a different electronic structure than a plasma. It seems like the main obstacles to progress with regard to cold fusion at this point are conceptual. People lack imagination. Not the free association, wild-and-crazy kind of imagination, but the lateral-thinking kind. Physicists similarly lacked imagination concerning possibilities for fission, fusion, superconductivity and relativity prior to the turn of the last century. That lack of imagination, and no doubt a touch of hubris, predisposed brilliant minds to disregard compelling evidence that weird things were going on at the time in their measurements. There were hints here and there, but those people failed to follow up on them with sufficient vigor to pry the lid off of the matter and get at something new and fantastic. That was left for other people, who were a little more detail-oriented in their approach and irritated by what they didn't understand. Today, a lack of imagination, and perverse incentives in academic research, seem to be having a similar effect. Personally, I feel both somewhat fortunate, and a little disheartened, to be following what seem to be new developments in physics when so many who have devoted themselves to the study of the field and who could help move things forward are dismissive of them. Eric
