SEQUEL TO THE “EFFICIENCY” PAPER First part.

MOTTO:

There are things you cannot do stepwise; you must do them at once and completely.
(from my lecture “Advices to young researchers and young married, 1986)

Good Motto, perfectly true for some decisions in research and war and in sex. Not always applicable; and… my fatal attraction to immediacy and ‘bis dat qui cito dat” has put me many times in trouble, because there are cases when exactly the contrary is true.
Haste for the sake of haste and of speed makes you like detergents- superficial. Complex problems have to be decomposed in smaller problems and these have to be solved one by one and finally you have to make a synthesis and improve it as long as it is necessary. Efficiency has more facets and my readers have had the generosity to contribute to the extended more precise and dynamic vision of LENR’s efficiency. It is about messages, publications, events and nascent memes- one of them possibly has to be aborted or downgraded. Unfortunately!
But I have a few things more to tell about LENR and efficiency.

Decisions.

Asking a bit rhetorically, what decisions should the LENR warriors take in order to make the field both effective and efficient? Thinking again, the question divides in two and the new question is who should/could/has to take the decisions and – by whom- could these decisions be enforced?
The cold fusion/LENR community is united mainly and perhaps only by the opinion that this source of energy exists and can, has to be, used for a very important energy source. But actually it is much dispersed geographically and conceptually and financially.  A real, manageable collective does not exist. No leaders or strong authorities. Who makes the decisions and who implements them?
In the disciplined way? Who has the privilege, chance and responsibility? The situation of decisions is pretty chaotic; however there exists intense communication between many members of this professional group and this is a reason for hope...

How to be more efficient? Who can tell us?
Do you know somebody really inerrant in the group? And not suffering from the Cassandra’s Syndrome?


An old rule of life and of all activities says:
“The irrationality and inefficiency of consuming, spending, using it is proportional to the scarcity of a resource” This is the causal explanation of the ancient but rather surprising Matthew’s Principle well known from the Bible: "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer"
Just ask the 1% from the top and the 1% from the bottom!
Isona, (not Themis!) the genuine Goddess of Equality is a skinny lady, desperately weeping all the time, the poor girl!

Anyway the situation of CF/LENR was characterized by strong scarcity therefore the funds were spent more on measurement than on intensification, creativity was forced to find simple explanations and to reject complex but realist ones, a very expensive rare metal was preferred to more mundane ones as the cheap “devil”, and, by bad chance, the story started with
the more costly isotope of hydrogen in an inherently poisoned sensitive electrolysis cell. Only a miracle could make this work efficient.
As I have shown it:  the situation has to be changed.
Everything could change if the field attracts big money and Matthews curse is removed. Perhaps.

Just these days marked by the US elections it is ‘comme il faut’ to cite smart American Presidents, ergo:
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. (Theodore Roosevelt) 
Good decision, bad decision, no decision- my colleague, discussion partner and friend Abd-ul Rahman Lomax has excellent plans for LENR, however no entity, no institution can
decide. Asking again, who can and shall decide? A basic question –how to start the necessary paradigm shift?

Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. (Blaise Pascal)
You know the author the wise guy with the wager re existence of God.  Re. this famous wager, the decision depends much on how does look and how is managed a 5-star Paradise in Heaven Thinking, research, reading, secular music, humor, drinking, sex, travel- are recommended, tolerated or strictly prohibited? If we make the choice warmly supported by Pascal we have great chances to go in such a place after dying.  I will take the decision only if I know exactly these facts- and I think this is not a singular attitude. Otherwise as the song says it;”che sera, sera!”
As my friend Butulescu says “I prefer the Hell if it is connected to the Internet.”
This thinking reed thing is a bit of exaggeration and over-generalization; quite precise statistical data show that:

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think. (George Bernard Shaw)

“We” belong to the upper 2%! Fortunately the extreme challenge of the LENR field- very similar to: “old age it is not for sissies” (guess the author) we all think because we have too. Therefore my colleagues have furnished me ideas we may discuss here.

The most powerful idea: let’s start with the understanding of  LENR.
Being an old, dry, weak, curved back reed, still trying hard to think- I have greeted the idea with enthusiasm: we are superior beings, rational and creative creatures with insight, courage, fantasy and power of anticipation. That the method, based on cognition!
Abd says: “Understanding LENR is a must and the highest priority.”
We will create first an image of what LENR is and how LENR works. This idea is a wannabe meme.
At a certain point, my reader friend Alain called my attention to something great, unpopular and usually oppressed: critical thinking! Isn’t this idea too noble, too beautiful? Openness- that one of the secrets of efficient thinking, let’s take a look to the
happier neighbors or relatives of LENR.
And here it is: High Temperature Super Conductivity, three years older than LENR. People like me, with a technophoric vein, were overly enthusiastic when the Bednorz-Mueller paper:
http://www.w2agz.com/Library/HTSC%20History/(1986)%20Bednorz%20-%20Mueller,%20Z%20Phys%20B%20(CM)%2064,%20189.pdf
was published. We thought this is just a start, in a few years we will have new materials superconducting at room temperature and even in boiling water and our electricity bills will shrink to say 10% of what they were in 1986. And obviously this progress will be based on a bright, perfectly predictive theory of HTSC. The reality was different and rather disappointing. Limited applications, material problems, slower progress and no good theory yet... See please the “fastest” Web information re HTSC theory

High-temperature superconductivity at 25: Still in suspense
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475280a.html
Two quotations from the paper:
A quarter of a century after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, there is still heated debate about how it works. 
and
It's not that there's no theory; there are lots of theories — just none that most people agree on. This sounds quite LENR-like! The vital difference is that the HTSC experiments are reproducible, powerful and do not generate nasty problems.

An other example following Daniel Rocha’s metaphoric idea
is photosynthesis. Overly complex, and it seems each bacteria, alga or superior plant species uses its own variant of photosynthesis. Similar to LENR as inner complexity but working
well for beings lacking understanding- plants are functional and survive in their ways. For hundreds of million years.
Not very encouraging for the idea.
.
Can you please give some convincing counter-examples, cases in which theory is the guide, leader and counselor of the experiment?
Perhaps nuclear fission and, in part hot fusion- but LENR “wants” to differentiate from these.
But not totally demoralizing- just we have to accept that we will work with a less or more approximate and incomplete and still developing theory.
More important, as part of the coming paradigm change it is necessary to abandon the idealistic view It has to be replaced with the 3 effective antonyms of idealistic: - materialistic (efficiency of resources), pragmatic (efficiency of actions) and realistic (efficiency of knowledge)

- To be continued-
Peter