1. What history teaches us (and what it doesn’t?)
I will ask the readers who love
history to go directly to 2.
During my 75+ years of life I have developed a form of
phobia from history, a fear that it will repeat what it was the worst of it,
and I consider that trying too hard to use some historical data for problem
solving, is actually delaying or killing the Solution. The bad memes of history
never die. The invisible strings with
which the “leaders” are manipulating us are coming from the past. Thinking and
feeling as somebody who lived in a small country: “Geography
is destiny, history is a prison” Thinking about many
irrational things from the present: “The 21st Century is the 12th,
resurrected” At least for and due to billions of human beings. The cult of
History is used mainly for doing harm, for kindling the fires of hatred and
violence, for demonstrating superiority above the enemies i.e. those who have
an opposite view of the shared history or just are different...
Old
books, old ideas, old stories have some value for solving the problems of the
present/future but a rather limited value. Why? It is an unavoidable, cruel Law
of Nature and of knowledge that says: “NOT what
we know, but what we don’t know is more important for solving the problem.” The validity of this
law is proportional, not with the importance of the problem, but with the extent
of damage made by NOT solving it. Surely, you will find examples for this rule
in your own professional experience.
Plus, due to the
world’s inherent interestingness, historical analogies are interesting but of
limited use and persuasion power.
OK, if you still invest
hopes in history instead of looking it with objectivity and with realistic
sympathy and gratitude for some exceptional positive personalities who
individually have failed but have contributed to the general progress- yes, in
this case feel free to read and meditate upon these quotations:
2. The bad start of Cold fusion’s history.
The discovery of Cold Fusion that was announced on March 23, 1989 has happened in such
bad circumstances that have justified a new word, miscovery, for it: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2012/05/concept-of-miscovery-and-what-it-means.html
Its very existence was
aggressively denied, on theoretical basis. One of Cold Fusion’s archenemies,
Prof John Huizenga said about the Three Miracles necessary to be explained if
Cold Fusion does exist: Coulomb barrier penetrated, no neutrons and no gammas
or X-ray resulting from fusion. Obviously miracle is just a mild euphemism for
impossible. Huizenga was unable to realize that Cold Fusion is different.
History will pardon him because Cold Fusion, now LENR is very, very different
from Hot Fusion- some of us have started just now to understand its newness.
Miracle was a euphemism,
but so are the Three Marks of Cold Fusion. The field had an especially bad
luck- it is about curses, stigmata, uninvited
fairies. We have already told about two of these bad marks:
First, Cold Fusion was
discovered by geniuses having perhaps the worst profession/specialty-
electrochemists and actually electrochemistry actually has not much to do with
these new phenomena
Second, Cold Fusion was
discovered in the worst possible place, with such parents its
cradle was an electrolytic cell, i.e a collection of impurities in water,
working at low temperatures. The metal chosen, palladium is the one in which
bulk and surface compete desperately for deuterium; I have written many
negative CF odes to it.
Third - everybody knows that:”There
is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." Victor
Hugo CF has obtained a lot of interesting scientific results but nothing
good for a technology, it can be characterized more by an antinomy of
“powerful” I have seen tens of bright theories failing to explain LENR. Neither
theory, nor experiments were able to make the process reproducible or to scale
it up. I have learned from Piantelli about the decisive role of nanotechnology-
that was not well developed in 1989. Defkalion has demonstrated the magnificent
complexity of the useful (HENI) process. Recently, my friend Axil has revealed
clearly the third bad mark- CF was discovered before its time, when both the
understanding and the tools for solving its development problem were available.
Very soon we will get answers,
hopefully positive to the two trillion dollars question: is LENR an idea whose
time has come?
Let’s re-think the history of
Cold Fusion and open a new, productive chapter of it.
Peter
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