Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> The study was a bit naive. It seems to assume that reality will > automatically mean that engineering is possible. Assuming the high power reported by Rossi, Celani and others is real, that proves beyond doubt it is possible to engineer a practical system. There is no example in history of an energy source that was discovered, scaled up to this extent, but proved physically impossible to control. Many sources are too expensive, but anything that can be scaled up can be controlled. Muon fusion obviously cannot be. I am sure it would be possible to scale up and build a Pd-D cold fusion reactor too. Probably it could be done on the kilowatt scale right now. But it would cost a fortune and it would be of no use. Still, if you kept working on it, it would be a lot cheaper than the Mars Curiosity Pu power supply. > That, in fact, has been an assumption of the pseudoskeptics. > > "If cold fusion is real, how come we don't have a cold fusion hot water > heater? after all, it's been over twenty years. Obviously, it's not real." > That argument is silly. It is just a matter of money and politics. If a few hundred million dollars had been made available, or maybe a billion, and the political opposition dynamited away, I am sure we would have had prototype cars years ago. Once you get to this stage of development it is just a matter of money. There can no fundamental reason why this problem cannot be solved, when every single similar problem in the history of technology *was* solved. The scientific method has not magically stopped working. Scientists who say they don't believe it are merely demonstrating Szpak's Law: 'Scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe.' In other words, when you announce the cold fusion has been funded, hundreds of thousands of scientists will suddenly realize they believed it all along. The conversion will be so sudden and complete they will forget that they ever held any other opinion. This may take a major effort, one person is not enough! > I am sure it will take thousands of people before we actually have working machines. Hundreds of thousands of people, and billions of dollars. Heck, it took a billion to develop the Prius, which is a minor incremental improvement in comparison. - Jed
