🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <921210152138_72240.1256_EHL63-1@CompuServe.COM> Jed Rothwell <72240.1256@compuserve.com> writes:

   ... The nickel cells are infinitely
   easier to replicate, more stable, far more powerful, and more predictable. The
   palladium based systems are a useless dead end. Who cares about them? The idea
   is to get heat, not to bash you head against the wall for months and months
   trying to replicate an experiment that cost SRI $2 million bucks to get
   anywhere with. Why bother? ... From my point of view, Tom and the
   others who are still working with palladium are setting up an expedition to
   cross the American continent by Conestoga wagon, when they could just buy a
   ticket and fly Delta. The object is to get there, not to suffer along the way.

Well, your analogy almost works, but not quite.  It is really more
like travelling to Shangri-La by Conestoga wagon vs. Delta airlines.
In the beginning we had some people who said it's not hard to get
there, just get in your wagon and go, you can find it.  Unfortunately
they oculdn't show us how because of patent claims.  Then it turned
out it took weeks to get there, and was a lot harder than they said.
People who claimed to have been there weren't able to describe how to
get back again, their cameras didn't work or something while they were
there, etc.  Now, some new people come along and say forget the
Conestoga wagons, here's Delta air lines, it works, guaranteed.  Well,
not exactly *guaranteed*, it turns out it's harder than it looks, but
we can do it whenever we want, unfortunately we can't show you how we
do it because we want to make money off it, etc.

As Scotty on Star Trek said, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me
twice, shame on me."  When Pons and Fleischmann first announced, I was
sort of willing to believe (based on their reputations) that two
miracles could occur: fusion could take place in palladium at room
temperature and the fusion would not produce copious amounts of
neutrons.  But I'm not willing to believe in a third miracle, namely
that it doesn't require special materials like deuterium.
*Especially* since the theory claimed to explain this kind of fusion
invokes sub-orbital states of hydrogen, which *really do* violate
quantum mechanics -- they are not just situations that might not have
been considered before, like deuterium in palladium with applied
electrical energy.

-- J