There has been some discussion here about why the people from Sweden who are investigating the Rossi device missed their deadline. I have absolutely no inside information on this. I have no idea why they are late. However, I have worked with professors for many years and I know why other professors often miss deadlines. Let me describe some of the reasons.
First, a likely non-reason. Kevin O’Malley suspects they may be involved in inside trading, and they are hoarding the information for that reason. I doubt it because: 1. Professors are usually not well-versed in things like investments and business. This is a cliché but it is true nonetheless. 2. They often hoard information but the usual reason is to achieve academic priority. 3. It seems unlikely to me that anyone will be able to cash in on this information in the near term. What would you do? Short sell oil company stocks? There is no direct way to invest in Rossi’s device at this stage. On to the reasons -- Age. These professors are old. It is sad to say this but, there is no way a person in his 60s can work as hard or accomplish as much as someone in his 20s or 30s. They know too much about old methods and not enough about new ones. As Mizuno says, “we are analog people living in a digital world.” Urgency & priority. They feel no sense of urgency. They often stop working in the middle of an important project to devote six months to editing a book on some obscure academic aspect of electrochemistry. The older people get in the less time they have left in their life the more they are willing to dillydally and delay. This is a mystery to me. No customers. The underlying problem is that they have no customer, and no deadline. If a software company delays producing a new version of a product for a year, it gets in deep trouble. Its income is cut off. Professors are paid no matter what they do. Most of these professors are probably retired so they get paid a pension no matter what they do. Funding. They probably have only shoestring funding. The nature of research. All real scientific research is groundbreaking, by definition. It is something that people have never done before in history. Of course they have done similar things, but never this particular experiment. It is usually harder than anyone anticipated. It takes longer. It costs more. I mean much more: a factor of 10 or 100 more. When Oppenheimer went to organize the laboratory at Los Alamos, he thought he would need a few dozen experts. They ended up with thousands. People never do groundbreaking research right the first time. If you look at the design of early experiments or the first versions of new technology you see it is suboptimal. Perfectionism. Some professors are obsessive perfectionists. They do in experiment one way, then they think of a better method and they go back and spend several months doing it again even though the first results were important and good enough to be published. A famous example of perfectionism and the never ending development cycle in software is the “Duke Nukem" saga, described here: "Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem" http://www.wired.com/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/ - Jed
