Sunday, October 14, 2012

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

4 comments:

  1. Peter,
    Some humble remarks as the result of the "food for thought" contained in this part of your sequel:

    1. By definition Christianity is a monotheist religion, wright? Even though, it maintains many mini-gods (some with very specific obligations) and totems (such as the Sindone or body-pieces of different saints) through a successful paradigm shift in history. In such paradigm shift, which was designed and executed some centuries AC, the goal was to get as much as more social perception on the new dogma maintaining in parallel a decision support hierarchical schema, always acting/deciding with the minimax critiria by all official churches (minimize the maximum loss, which in this case was the non-social-perception of official dogmas, that could outcome revolutions etc).

    Such "by definition" in LENR follows the same characteristics by the scientific priesthood dominating this field over the last 23 years with decisions taken the same way as by churches in the past: try to get the maximum perception within the main stream academia that can not trigger any revolution, following also a monotheistic-like definition on LENR term and research approaches, which concluded to the non efficiency of such religions over the last century (even though this approach seems still effective).

    2. On the contrary: By principle (and definition) Internet did not suffer of such problems on efficiency/effectiveness. In its beginning people in CERN designing www understood that they had to make a decision: allowing the open use of such net and its self-organizing non-hierarchical characteristic or to control its evolution by restrict rules and mechanisms? They decided the first, even though there was the risk of bad use on such network from porno-industry or pedophilia. So far such decision seems to be the most successful paradigm-shift through decision making in R&D, as far as Timothy Berners was not under fear, making such decision in his R&D, trusting people's perception on what he thought correct. During those days, Berners had no theory at all on how such a net could exploit and be useful through www. He relied on his fearless scientific principal that what he could make wrong other people would fix, if they have the chance to do so with no restrictions.

    3. The same paradigm shift as internet stands for wikipedia, which signals as the new Encyclopedia of the next revolutionary era in all scientific fields and knowledge build.

    4. In order LENR to follow such successful paradigm shifts such as Internet or wikipedia, effectiveness/efficiency needs to follow the same principles. There is one prerequisite to apply such principles when making decisions on research: the lack of fear. The publication of confirmed results of our paradigm shift will appear soon. But still, this will be not enough to get all fear out through a total paradigm shift that could turn this scientific field into a fruitful (in terms of effectiveness and efficiency) area. Still pseudo-monotheistic dogmas invented by gurus have to be taken away. As quick as possible!
    Looking forward for the next.
    Yannis


    PS: As for A. Rossi who appeared shooting his leg in public again, it is obvious that he did not attended any of his classes in philosophy as well, so such discussion leaves him out. Obviously he likes (has decided) to be a Burner and Burned martyr in this field and not its Berners.


    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Yannis,

    Thank you very much. I understand that you consider fear, rigid dogma (and elastic too) and closed-mindedness as deadly enemies of creativity and this applies for LENR.
    You are much younger than me, you had not "lived" the 23+ years of LENR history, the continuous sinusoidal of great hopes and deep disillusion. However surely you have experienced directly the miraculous ascension of the WWWeb and the - I really cannot name it! development of the Wikipedia that is almost omniscient, can answer to myriads of questions.
    As regarding Tim, i.e. Sir Timothy Berners-Lee the great thing is that he remained in harmony and resonance with his invention, despite the fact that this ahs increased at a multi-hyper-exponential speed much beyond any over-optimistic expectation.
    We owe him much and our duty is to accomplish a similar LENR energy revolution. no dogma should stay in the way!

    Rossi remains an enigma_ I have written too much about him.
    I still have a positive Pareto opinion toward him, *0% of my brain and mind wants to believe he has invented something important jus can not manage it well, the rest of 20% says calm down, once you were not so credulous. I remain undecided
    Peter

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peter
    Again you encourage with your thinking. It is good that you keep planting these seeds as some are bound to take root & refocus needed attention back to understanding & better harnessing developments such as LENR.

    It seems an enormous amount of otherwise useful mental energy is being, and continues to be, burned up by the pro & anti Rossi antics. It seems to me I have wasted too much energy trying to research him and his claims rather than focusing on what is needed to move this new energy field forward. The only positive that might (IMHO) come from Rossi's antics, is that a lot more people are thinking about the possibilities than would have had he not started his (in)famous circus.

    I am encouraged by DGT's smart decision to bail out from involvement in Rossi's 'ecat wars' saga and quieten down & just get on with the job. The real hope there is that they are making progress and have the capacity to keep doing so.

    Because of the stigma of past association with Rossi, I have been very cautious about being seen to promote / support DGT although I have had good feedback from some NASA related people and have always been intrigued by Peter's open support of DGT. I think it may be time for more of us to offer support based on the current more mature approach to DGTs research and progress.

    My belief re Rossi is that no matter what Piantelli success he was able to repeat, he (Rossi) will be out on a limb assuming the long expected rejection of his IPO patent happens within the announced 4 months by the IPO. It is though equally intriguing as to Piantelli's notification that his IPO patent application (priority back to Oct 2008) is expected to be approved. This must surely have a significant impact of willingness to invest in Ni+H LENR type research. At the moment I do see patent protection as a good reason for more adventurous big corporations to get behind LENR. I am sure we here all agree that few companies want to invest any more in Pd+D projects. Peter has long pointed out the futility in trying to kick down that wall. A wall that appears to be far to thick.

    So, I am wanting to see DGT continue to progress and remain out of the pirahna infested channels of this river.

    Doug Marker



    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you very much. I will try to answer to your implicit questions in the frame of a new paper due for next week. Now i have to help an old friend with a rather long translation.

      The paper will be an extension of the concept of Truth. Not sterile philosophy- just realism.
      Peter

      Delete