Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: Dave, we are trying to find out what nature has decided. To do this, > assumptions have to be made, which are tested against what nature reveals. > The simplest assumption is to explore only a single process. >
This is the default assumption for most research. It is Occam's razor, which is sometimes expressed as: do not multiply entities unnecessarily. This is a rule of thumb. It is not a physical law, or even an observation of nature. It is the kind of thing you might preface by saying, "it is generally a good idea to . . ." (not multiply entities / check for leaks after you join two pipes together / conduct initial flight tests in good weather / etc.) It is certainly not a joke. You would be a fool to ignore this dictum. What I have in mind with the "conservation of miracles" idea is similar, but perhaps a little different. It seems unlikely there are many different ways to produce anomalous heat from hydrides and yet they have all been hidden for the last 150 years. If there are many different mechanisms, it seems likely that some would be far easier to discover that others, and someone would have stumbled over an easy one long ago, rather than having them all appear after March 1989. People discovered things like the Seebeck effect (thermoelectricity) in 1821 because that wasn't hard to detect. They did not discover the transistor effect until 1948 because that called for very pure materials and new theory. - Jed
