At 02:47 PM 5/26/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
In other countries such as Italy, Japan and China as well, nearly all funding is from the governments. Granted, Toyota and some others contributed a little, but only in tandem with governments.
And when it became clear that the Pons-Fleischmann approach to LENR had very little commercial promise, if any, that it was *difficult* to make this reliable, and, of course, reliability is essential to commercial application, Toyota backed out. They did not make it clear why they were doing this, which is unfortunate, it gets presented as if they found cold fusion was bogus. They did not.
By the time Toyota backed out, it was clear that cold fusion was real. But *difficult* to make reliable. It is possible to imagine making cold fusion useful if it can be shown to be statistically reliable, but it's a lot more work, requiring simultaneous miniaturization and multiplication.
Jed's basic point stands. This is mostly blue-sky research, with no *immediate* commercial application, if we set aside the wild cards, i.e., Rossi et al. Most of that research, really, remains to be done, there are fundamental questions about cold fusion that have never been adequately investigated, so heavy was the pressure to try to make cells "reliable," with higher energy output, instead of carefully and repeatedly investigating what was already found.
I.e., doing science, as distinct from trying to engineer what is not understood, a process that can be little more than stabbing in the dark. If Rossi found a "secret sauce," it would probably have little to do with a theoretical understanding and much more to do with simply trying a lot of stuff. Too bad he had no understanding of scientific protocols, he thought that "controls" were laughable. Supposedly he already knows what a control E-cat would do, i.e., nothing.
But it would not do *nothing* if it had the same power input as his test E-cat. It would show the behavior of an E-cat without the "secret sauce," compared to with it. It would have largely killed the objections to his tests, leaving only pure fraud (which is impossible to completely disprove aside from truly independent testing.)
