I thought this was an interesting viewpoint expressed by B.J. Hiley, David Bohms longtime collaborator, on the nature of theoreticians and their relationship to experimental science. As he puts it:
*I didn’t mind doing it because I think it’s very important if you’re doing theoretical physics to get a feel of what it’s like in a laboratory, making things work. I’ve heard some theoreticians talking and it’s quite clear they don’t even know what a laboratory is. They’ve never been in a laboratory and they’ve never tried to get even simple bits of apparatus working. They just have ideas of what the measurement is—and it’s nothing like that. It’s much too idealized.* I feel this captures perfectly the character of the controversies surrounding Pons and Fleischman in 1989. Most of the critics of their work were theoreticians who, beyond knowing what constituted good neutron detection, didn't know a thing about what constituted good lab work in chemistry generally and calorimetry specifically. As a result the majority of people threw the baby (excess heat) out with the bathwater (nuclear products). They were silly enough to proclaim that P and F were "working outside their area of expertise" when in fact its likely not a single critic from the physics community would have even know how to set up an electrolytic cell, let alone how to upkeep and monitor one over an extended test period. The rest of the article can be found here for those that are interested: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/11/04/the-wholeness-of-quantum-reality-an-interview-with-physicist-basil-hiley/
