At 10:45 AM 2/28/2011, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
From Abd:
...
> Younger scientists are becoming educated in what actually
> happened in 1989-1990.
...
> The skepticism is most entrenched among physicists, who
> seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that there might be
> something happening that they don't understand.
The irony here is that encountering phenomenon that is not currently
understood (according to current accepted theory) is precisely what
physicists ought to yearn for in their professional lives.
One would think so. However, this is really only true for theoretical
physicists. The problems of LENR, as to theory, are not necessarily
likely to lead to increased employment for physicists. The practical
engineering, once there is decent theory, will be done by chemists
and materials scientists. Or "engineers," we might better call them.
I do think that if someone comes up with a killer theory, with high
predictive power, they might win a Nobel prize.
It's where
new discoveries have the best chance of being uncovered and
subsequently explored. It's the perfect opportunity for staking out
new scientific territories and making a professional name for oneself.
That's precisely what the next gen of post-docs and graduates in
physics are likely to do.
Move over! There is hope.
Yes, I think there is a lot of hope. There is a bootstrap problem. As
long as physicists believe that CF was conclusively rejected in 1989
-- or, alternatively, that the evidence was so weak that there is no
reason to believe LENR is possible -- they are not motivated to try
to explain what they don't believe is happening! That's why it's
necessary for some physicists to explore the data. There are clues:
Robert Duncan, for example, or the hot fusion physicists who have
been working on the problem. Takahashi's work is crying out for
review by others with expertise in quantum field theory. His work is
based on classical hot fusion work with deuteron bombardment. These
are doors, openings, that some physicists, I assume, will explore.
The problem is extremely difficult, or so it seems! Maybe when the
correct theory is developed, we will be slapping our heads over how
simple it is. But that is not at all guaranteed. Cold fusion is a
physically marginal effect. It, rather obviously, is not "normal."
("Marginal" does not mean that the results of the experiments are
marginal, but that setting up the conditions to observe the effect is
not simple and not necessarily easy. The effect itself, once it's
happening, stands out way above the noise.)
Give that it's marginal, the shortcuts used frequently to make
multibody problems possible to solve with quantum field theory don't
work. Those are the shortcuts that predicted that fusion couldn't
happen! I'm interested in Takahashi's TSC theory, not because it is
necessarily the "correct theory," but because it shows that ramping
up the accuracy of the analysis can result in a prediction of 100%
fusion under certain physical conditions that are either possible or
not far from possible under condensed matter conditions. Rare
conditions, fortunately, or we might have lost some part of the U of
Utah campus, in 1985. (And, of course, PdD "anomalous heat" would
have been noticed and recognized before.)
