MOTTO
Problems worthy of attack prove
their worth by hitting
back!” Piet Hein
Cold
Fusion/LENR is of very high worth, is the very key of the Energetic
Renaissance, therefore- it is clear as day- that It
has beaten us with the force of an 800 pound gorilla. The result is that 24
years after the advent of the problem, we do not understand it well and we are
not able to scale it up to the commercial level of an energy source. Actually,
the situation is much more complicated than that, both in the negative and the
positive sense. We are at the border of a new world, we do not understand our
situation well and we must RE-THINK everything we believed we know. You
must learn that the ability to re-think is vital (at least in the realm of
LENR). We must re-think – with respect but with no mercy for the old data,
facts, ideas and memes.
Actually,
why are we in this rather bad situation? I have told it many times clearly,
this is my personal opinion, because we are trying the impossible, squaring the
circle, walk on air, bending the steel with our hand- finding a simple short
actionable explanation for a complex, long sequence of events. Worse than
introducing a square peg in a round hole. Who, except humble reality will
believe me that this is the crux of the problem? A theorist who is not in love
with his own theory, created by himself, is not a pur-sang, genuine theorist.
For
a radical, deep, bold re-thinking of LENR we need powerful tools and an especially
strong willpower...
Now
I will tell you about one of these tools, one very efficient
and
immensely popular- the METAPHOR. As everybody, I was searching, using and
abusing metaphors all my life, however more instinctively and not taking them
too seriously. Then I had a revelation.
It
has happened before the Internet era; at our local library I came upon this PhD
Thesis: "Hyperknowledge and Continuous Strategy in Executive Support
Systems” by Hannu Vanharanta, Abo University Finland
This
Thesis, a high level strategic management opus has a short but crucial part
about the functions of the metaphor in management.
“To
describe an infinitely complex reality (only) by words is a difficult task and
therefore the metaphor plays an essential role in thinking. A successful
metaphor as “windows” for computers is a powerful means for communication and
understanding.
In management, the metaphors have 4 functions,
they are:
- expressive,
throwing a new light on the target domain;
- exegetic,
trying to describe and to interpret complexity;
- explanatory,
explaining for predicting
- exploratory,
suggesting new directions and activities for search.
I
was very impressed and this fragment of the thesis became a
strong
personal meme for me. The effect was enhanced by a beautiful metaphor authored
by Piet Hein that I have read the same day, this one:
The
Paradox of Life
a
bit beyond perception's reach
I
sometimes believe I see
that
life is two locked boxes, each
containing the other's key.
I
have started to use consciously metaphors as a tool for problem solving and for
deep understanding, as an antidote of the sometimes overwhelming complexity I
met in many places. I included them in my life long learning programs. I have
collected them and I have subscribed to some newsletters dedicated to metaphor
as http://www.annemiller.com/archives.asp
You,
my dear young friend have to discover the richness and enormous potential of
the metaphors, starting with their definition and basic features- for example
in the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_language_metaphors
Expand
your thinking and change your life (if you can) with Metaphorology: http://www.metaphorology.com/ I wish to change my life, to be fifty again and to
join the team of Defkalion but I have doubts that even myriads of smart metaphors
can help me. My last personal metaphor will be: smelling the flowers from the
side of the roots. But this is not urgent.
I have collected
metaphors for subjects as: life, death, brain, learning, Internet, business,
the Crisis, blog(s) etc. But in meantime the Web has grown tremendously and now
you can find the best metaphors for all concepts instantly.
Just for fun I
will show you a site with stupidity metaphors, my trolls have used for
characterizing me: http://www.ironmagazineforums.com/open-chat/41936-43-metaphors-stupidity.html
You will discover step by
step the world of metaphors, old and new, popular and abused (as the light at
the end of the tunnel) and you will have the vision of an enormous swarm of
useful, helpful locusts.
However let’s “return to our
muttons”, that is to LENR, I try to teach you applied
metaphorology for problem solving not theoretical just for PKM. I have already
published an entire metaphor story when I understood the general situation in
the field, its real history and the most probable perspective. http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2012/03/metaphor-story-of-lenr.html This is a 1 year old paper but
I would not retract anything from it.
Recently I have
used a new metaphor for LENR: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2013/03/lenr-is-not-asong-it-is-opera-advent-of.html
This came in
combination with the Pdisaster idea actually hitting two sacred
cows of LENR between the horns- i.e the possibility of creating an elegant
simple, highly mathematical theory of the phenomenon and the idea that the
cradle and the car of LENR will be made from the same noble metal palladium.
Opera as
metaphor of LENR
This is a first
attempt to use the functions of the metaphors in management (and in life and in
science) to deduce some truths and to build a strategy for LENR. Please
consider it what it is- a start.
Expressive:
Being an opera
means being complex, composed of parts, multi-sequential, a difficult teamwork.
Opera has action and needs a leader- LENR happens at useful levels and in
controlled modes only in a very well adjusted combination of parameters (a lot
of them) by strictly respecting some rules that have to be discovered and known
by the participants. Once learned this lesson and rehearsed with intelligence
and skill, the efforts become invisible and everything seems easy, simple at
the surface and:”flowing” naturally. The opera is as the motto and the title
of: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2011/03/explaining-opera-music-of-all-noises.html
says it is very expensive; LENR on its turn is will consume huge quantities of
intellectual and creative energy before being everyday global technological
reality, a great source of energy...
An opera is the
result of cooperation, but its action is based on confrontation between Good
and Evil (or two evils), love and hatred, past and future. It is trial and
error. It is un-moderated cruel fighting, death, murder and suicide are used
and abused. This does not fit well for LENR, however a prioritary task is to
discover the hidden enemies that can kill or diminish the functionality of the
LENR generators.
The opera has
acts and scenes and all are components of an artistic Whole; it is not possible
to reduce the opera to the most dramatic scene or the most popular aria as “I
have broken through the Coulomb Barrier” because there is much more at the
stake. It seems any LENR opera has three acts: the first- pre-nuclear, the
second nuclear but in a very special and strange way and the third post-nuclear
when good and warm things happen.
The success of
LENR depends on deep understanding and wise action i.e. much more than a
theory.
Exegetic:
The opera
metaphor has the potential to describe better than any collection of facts and
ideas- the reality of LENR. When you understand the real role of metaphors in
thinking you are aware of the “metaphor of the metaphor”. The metaphor of a
healthy good metaphor is a living, changing, growing, improving, learning, developing
entity not a static, invariable bureaucratic one. The relation between the
subject of the metaphor and the object to which is compared cannot be
standardized for all cases, being a relation in multi-layers form, more layers
both in space and in time comprising the problems, the solutions, the history
of the composition, the world-wide debut, the best performances. At first
sight, the opera metaphor has three inherent seemingly destructive drawbacks
that would make anybody less stubborn than me to abandon it immediately:
a)there are many
operas but very few are successful see please a list of some 25,000 operas of
2500 composers at OperaGlass http://opera.stanford.edu,
a much shorter list of important operas here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_operas
and some data about popular operas http://iopera.www9.50megs.com/opera1.html,
a really extremistan-ic distribution- but a merciless selection process.
Conclusion we have to associate LENR with a really good opera!
b) serious opera is a highly pessimistic, negative and
depressive art, most operas are tragedies death is always there and its victims
are young, lovable people. It seems some Twin
Peaks principle (the Evil is indestructible and
always wins) rules in the world of operas. There are a few cases where the
opera is not so damned realistic and has a happy ending for the main heroes,
usually after removing or sacrificing some victims; Conclusion: we have to find
an opera with happy end!
c) for the actual LENR opera (or operas?) there are only separate and mutually
incompatible fragments of the libretto and the entire music still has to be
composed. There is information about some rather simple primitive LENR melodies
composed by Nature. However music is the highest form of art, while sculpture
(as Michelangelo teaches us, works by
removing the unnecessary parts of the marble, music cannot be created by removing
noise, it has to be created from scratch. Much more work than for a single
song. Conclusion: the genuine opera metaphor of LENR has to be created!
These are difficult problems, and we have to use a lot of
scipiology, the high art of converting disasters in triumphs and drawbacks in
competitive advantages- in order to keep and develop our favorite metaphor.
Explanatory
As you could see, there are many unknown unknowns regarding
the LENR opera. It is about love that’s certain and the lovers need a very
strong love potion that’s also for sure. However, amazingly we don’t know
who the lovers are! There are two popular operas centered on love potions:
“L’elisir d’amore” by Gaetano Donizetti and “Tristan and Isolde” by Richard
Wagner. Both are useless for our metaphor. In the first the potion is
manufactured by a Dr Dulcamara, an itinerant snake oil merchant and such
persons are “non-grata” in the LENR opera. The second, described in one
sentence as: “They love each other and they both die." is eliminated due its bad ending. LENR will
have no ending at all, but will become an opera seria in endless series, I predict.
You have to remember that Defkalion, which has the best LENR (they call it
HENI) scenario has stated that even a ternary love potion is not sufficient to
“make hydrogen more reactive and nickel more receptive”. I can accept that in
the original Pd based system it is about a deuterium loves deuterium
non-straight system because this will not become a technology. (I bet!) However
Defkalion’s results show that something very complex happens-
lets it express with open-mindedness- kind of GruppenSex of the chemical
elements. I think that everything is better than some form of the H + H
reactions predicted e.g. by Ed Storms theory, Beyond any operas I think that
Nature does not admit constrains and in different systems behaves very
differently. On the technological level, I hope there will be tested
successfully many precious transition metals besides nickel and Defkalion et al
will be able to convert complexity
to completeness, dynamicity to immediacy, diversity to diversification
Exploratory
As in so many occasions in R & D we must
accept a compromise, a non-ideal opera as more proximal metaphor for LENR as it
is today. It has to be. as already shown a popular opera with a happy ending. I
don’t understand much of Mozart\s Magic Flute (“Protege of mad Freemasonry sect
marries abducted Princess”). Liberation operas as Beethoven’s Fidelio or
Mozart’s “Abduction of the Seraglo” do not fit at all to LENR and carry too
simple messages.
Then I have eventually found the “solution”:
Turandot by Giaccomo Puccini. The story is very idiotic but much better than,
say, Edgar by the same author or Verdi’s “Il trovatore” having librettos wit
negative IQ... Turandot, in one sentence “In ancient China
This opera is a good metaphor and the crazy, frigid,
revengeful princes is a sub-metaphor of LENR’s basic problem... Turandot has
asked only 3 riddles, our Calafs have to answer much more, all the time. The
finale of the opera is wonderful exactly what will happen to LENR. Turandot
(problem) is brought back to normality; Turandot the symbol of one main
component learns the infinite power of love. Calaf, the genuine researcher is
triumphant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATmgtmR5o4
He says: "Vanish, o night! Fade, you stars! Fade, you stars! At
dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win! "
Something like this will happen with LENR soon. However, as you
know, when life imitates art, it always adds some interesting complications.
Peter
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