JonesBeene <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Do ”dark projects” exist in the National Labs? Of course they do. >
Yes, of course they do. But we don't hear about them because they are dark. We sometimes hear about them long after they finish. It turns out most of them are a waste of money. But that is true of most R&D projects, both light and dark, government and industrial. My guess is that dark projects are more prone to be a waste, because they are not reviewed or critiqued by a wide range of people. Most of the secret projects I have heard about in cold fusion were a waste. Most scientific secrets are not worth keeping secret, and not worth knowing about. Secret business plans that I have heard of usually turn out to be stupid. A famous example of a dark project that was a waste of time & money was when the CIA raised a sunken Russian submarine K129, with help from Howard Hughes. I read that by the time they recovered it, the technology was long obsolete and they learned nothing of importance. That was in the book "Blind Man's Bluff" as I recall. - Jed
