Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote:
> Once again - nothing wrong with people in large organizations. > I am saying they could be more effective if broken down and organized for > rapid changes (read adapt to the reality we live in). > You are saying people "could be" more effective, in your opinion. I am pointing out that in actual historical fact, in the case of cold fusion, they were not more effective. Fleischmann, Pons, Srinivasan and the others were all part of large groups in established institutions. They made contributions to cold fusion. Very few people in small institutions, and few individuals working on their own have made contributions to cold fusion. Leslie Case and Andrea Rossi are the only examples that come to mind. People such as Ed Storms and Tom Claytor have made contributions working at home, but they are drawing upon expertise they developed at Los Alamos, and in some cases they are still using instruments at Los Alamos. You are describing a counter-factual version of history. You are saying that perhaps in parallel universe, cold fusion would have worked better if it had been developed by small groups. Perhaps you are right but there is no way to prove it. There may be other discoveries and inventions which works better pursued by individuals or by small groups. Offhand, other than the airplane, I cannot think of many fundamental breakthroughs in the last 200 years that did not originate in large institutions. Fundamental breakthrough such as the incandescent light were made by individuals such as Edison and Tesla. They had lots of institutional support and lots of Wall Street capital. After 1906 the Wright brothers also had mainstream Wall Street support, without which they would have failed, in my opinion. People such as Mizuno were part of mainstream institutions but they encountered a great deal of opposition from other people in those institutions. I am not suggesting that all large institutions have welcomed this research. Pam Boss and others have had to fight decision-makers in the Navy all along. Many minor incremental technological breakthrough such as the software from Microsoft were done by small groups of individuals -- Bill Gates in that case. Compared to the fundamental R&D in computers and in software conducted by the government before 1975, the contributions made by Gates are trivial. He repackaged work that was already done in mainstream institutions and mostly paid for by Uncle Sam. You could make the case that the billions of dollars he earned should have gone to the taxpayers who paid for 99% of the work before he started. You could say the same for most of the money made in Internet ventures. These people are building minor improvements to an infrastructure paid for by the taxpayers. They just happen to the first to come up with an implementation. For example, the first product made by Gates was Microsoft BASIC. BASIC was invented by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. Gates did an excellent job migrating it to microprocessors, but there were thousands of good programmers who might have done that. He just happened to be the first. Dartmouth is a private university but it is very much part of the establishment and a great deal of the money spent there comes from the federal government. That was already true in 1964. - Jed
