On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Of course it is erratic. The only question is: Is it erratic because of > random error or because the required conditions are not created every time. > We now know that certain critical conditions are required, which are not > created except by guided luck. So what? This problem is typical of all new > discoveries before they are mastered. > > > *All* new discoveries? It was not the case for fission reactors, the photoelectric effect, blackbody radiation, atomic spectroscopy, Rutherford scattering, electron diffraction, superconductivity, and so on. Low probability of success is characteristic of some developments like cloning or transistors, but in the latter case, a working transistor could be shown to work by anyone. And within a few years of the first demonstration of amplification, transistors were used in commercial products. If there were a working hunk of Pd that you could send to anyone, that would be another story, but as admitted by McKubre and demonstrated most recently by the MFMP, interlab reproducibility is still a bitch.
