Obviously Jed I do not mean a generic technician. The technician must be good at calorimetry, and work with electrochemical cells etc... but this is not enough.
A great technician is one who views his work as more than just a job to pay off the bills. They have a passion for what they do. For them it is an art, a craft and a science. Sure the people you mention are experts in the relevant science, but that doesn't necessarily make them the best technicians around. Harry Jed Rothwell wrote: Harry Veeder wrote: To reject cold fusion you must first reject chemistry and thermodynamics going back to the mid-19th century. This is a spurious argument. There is a difference between a measure of change and the "laws" or "theory" or whatever which is purported to be the best explanation of the change. Many skeptical arguments boil down to an assertion that calorimeters do not work. To be specific, skeptics claim that calorimeters cannot be trusted to with 10% or 30%, or 60% -- or whatever percent of excess heat is reported, on what you might call a sliding scale (or moving goalpost). If the experiment lasts a month, they claim that no calorimeter can be stable that long, even though calibrations show that the instrument is stable. Then, when an experiment produces heat after a week they suddenly realize that no calorimeter is stable for a week. These people sincerely believe this kind of nonsense, and in doing so they reject the basis of a large part of chemistry and physics. They might as well claim that no mass spectrometer can reliably measure the difference between iron and gold. It is far more important to have an experienced technician who can build a good apparatus and make decent measurements. The NHE program had superb technicians and the best equipment money can buy. Their measurements were correct to more decimal places than necessary. But the program failed miserably because the people working there were not electrochemists or materials experts, they did not read the literature, and they did not know how to interpret their own results. For example, they did not realize what was coating their cathodes, or that effect the coating had. As McKubre pointed out, they kept rediscovering and reporting phenomena that were described in electrochemistry textbooks decades ago ago. I am no expert, but I knew more about the cold fusion literature, and what other researchers had been done previously, than the NHE researchers did. Experienced technicians can contribute much to a good research program, but technical ability by itself is not enough. You must also have deep knowledge of the science, and experience. - Jed
