Safire eyes commercialization within 5 years, with launch of new company Aureon Energy!

Quote from Bruce__H

For me, there are 2 good points that "Professor" Dave made in his video. Neither has anything to do with the Electric Universe as such. First, Dave mentions that SAFIRE has no publications regarding its most distinctive claims. I believe that everyone here agrees with this although some think it doesn't matter. Dave thinks it is a problem and I agree. Second is Lowell Morgan's comment about the SAFIRE team ..."Monty and others are making fraudulent statements about their measurements". That isn't a thinly veiled insult, or an appeal to ridicule, nor does it require any prior belief level regarding the Electric Universe. It sounds to me like Morgan has something specific in mind. I see people trying to sweep it under the rug here and that is not the right way to proceed..

If publications are important, the Prof and others need to define what that means. Is one publication enough to support SAFIRE's claims? Two? Ten? And in which journals? Merely insisting that someone needs to publish something about something somewhere is vague and plays exactly into the hands of pseudo-skepticism. The goalposts can always be moved once SAFIRE achieves whatever vague goal detractors claim needs to happen before they can be taken seriously.

A profitable and useful venture requires three things: a working device, patent protection and a lot of funding. It doesn't require the approval of the scientific community. So I still argue that SAFIRE is taking a legitimate route to success. There are alternate routes, but none as direct as the one they're taking, as far as I can see.

If Morgan has a specific criticism in mind, he should lay it out in detail. Otherwise it's just the noise of a disgruntled former employee. It will be swept under the rug until it carries the weight of specificity.

Naturally, "Professor" Dave doesn't care about supporting evidence for Morgan's claims. As long as the narrative falls into Dave's set of assumptions, he's going to run with it.

Quote from LenrdSkynrd

Otherwise it's just the noise of a disgruntled former employee.

paid plasma research jobs are hard to come by

this may well have been Morgan's last

Quote from LenrdSkynrd

If publications are important, the Prof and others need to define what that means. Is one publication enough to support SAFIRE's claims? Two? Ten? And in which journals? Merely insisting that someone needs to publish something about something somewhere is vague and plays exactly into the hands of pseudo-skepticism. The goalposts can always be moved once SAFIRE achieves whatever vague goal detractors claim needs to happen before they can be taken seriously.

It isn't vague. If you make claims then you publish in sufficient detail that people cam replicate (or not) your results.

Quote from LenrdSkynrd

A profitable and useful venture requires three things: a working device, patent protection and a lot of funding. It doesn't require the approval of the scientific community. So I still argue that SAFIRE is taking a legitimate route to success. There are alternate routes, but none as direct as the one they're taking, as far as I can see.

The problem is that the recent history of LENR is that this is also a route self delusion and fraud.

Quote from Alan Smith

A very rich and successful inventor friend of mine has never ever filed a patent for that very reason.

That only works with difficult to replicate inventions that have a limited market. Or a niche market that competition will not take the trouble to invade, or reverse engineer. It also only works when the invention is only a relatively small expense to the customer, so the customer will not bother looking for a competitor. "Relatively small" might be millions of dollars. For example, if there is some specialized piece of test equipment costing $10,000 that is needed in an offshore oil well, there may be only one vendor for it, because other equipment companies may not go to the trouble to reverse engineer it, and because the oil companies don't care how much it costs.

In other words, that only works when a trade secret alone is enough to protect the invention.

With something like cold fusion, the market is so gigantic, and the applications so broad, thousands of industrial companies will go to any lengths to reverse engineer the devices. A trade secret will not last one month for cold fusion.

I should add that I am pretty familiar with this kind of trade secret method because my grandfather and I both made things that were not patented but we were the only ones who sold them. This can be a successful business strategy. I am not suggesting it is a bad idea. I am saying that with something with a gigantic market such as cold fusion, or airplanes, von Neumann computer architecture or transistors, this strategy will not work, and you need a patent.

Quote from Alan Smith

I agree with you in principle, but in practice I think you have a 2 year lead.

That is what the Wright brothers told their venture capitalist backers in 1907. Quoting my essay:

The competition was far behind, and making little progress in spite of the patent. The Wrights thought this gave them a precious lead they should “conserve.” In 1907 they wrote to Charles Flint: “We can furnish governments with practical machines . . . now: no one else can. There is no certainty that anyone else is within three years of us . . . The progress made by others since the announcement of our final success at the end of 1905 is as rapid as could reasonably be expected, but it by no means indicates that others will reach the goal in less time than we required.”

Their strategy was predicated on the preposterous idea that you can keep a patented airplane secret. It never seems to have occurred to them that once intense public interest ignites, the quality of replications must improve dramatically. Furthermore, they did not grasp that it is much easier to replicate than it is to invent something in the first place. They should have seen that only third-rate people were trying replicate them during this period, but that in a boom thousands of talented people would soon get to work and progress would be immeasurably swifter.

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf

About eight months after the world learned the airplane was real, other people were making better airplanes than theirs. They lost their technical lead. They did make money, because they had a patent. It was a struggle to collect the royalties.

A nice classical example of a succesfull trade secret is the production of Coca Cola. It's still a secret, although Pepsico did approach it pretty good.

Regarding patenting LENR, there is something to keep in mind: physical phenomena cannot be patented.
Although LENR phenomena are currently not common, once the fundamentals are better understood and physics laws are adapted, the fundamentals will probably not be accepted for patenting.
There will be plenty of room to patent implementatations and methods though.

Quote from Alan Smith

There's a difference between the era of the Wright brothers and LENR. Apart from the engine, early aircraft could be copied and built by a good cabinetmaker, a piano-maker, and a bicycle mechanic. Monkey see, monkey do! There was zero regulatory control, no safety protocol, and the build itself used widely available skills and materials. There was very little process knowledge involved in construction

That is true, but I do not see how it is relevant to the discussion. However difficult it may be to replicate a cold fusion device from a patent, it will be done, and done quickly. There are thousands of people with the skills and equipment needed to do that, at industrial corporations, national labs and places like that. Even without a patent, if devices become available, they will be reverse engineered. Even if this costs millions of dollars I am sure it will done.

Quote from Alan Smith

This btw is the timescale for Tesla building the model S with few financial constraints - and this involved no new paradigms. Some of these things can be done in parallel, but not all. Could LENR roll out be any easier after a protocol; is established?

Concept Approval: 3 months
Design & Modeling: 6 months
Production Design: 3 months

That is an entirely different subject. Here, you are talking about how long it might take to begin industrial production of cold fusion devices. That might take years. However, it will only take months to reverse engineer them and improve on them. For example, assuming Russ George's claims are correct, and people at an industrial corporation believed it and get some samples in hand, they would replicate within weeks and they would know how to make much better versions within months. They have hundreds of experts on tap. They have the best analytic tools on earth, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. However difficult it may be, if Russ can do it, they can do it too, and much better.

So, if Russ wants to protect the intellectual property, he can only do that by getting a patent. A trade secret would never work. The technology is far too valuable for that. If a big corporation had to pay $1 billion to reverse engineer it, they would do that without hesitation. I expect it could be done for less than $1 million, but whatever the cost, they would do it, and so would hundreds of other corporations, along with every military establishment on earth.

Quote from Alan Smith

F&P were in a similar place to the Wright brothers 30 years ago. So far commercially useful systems have still not appeared, neither is there an industry waiting with the tools and skills - and no other work - to build them.

No one tried to replicate the Wrights from 1903 to 1908, because no one believed them. Except for a few incompetent people. Their 1906 patent was ignored. In August 1908 they demonstrated airplanes in France and Washington DC. The press went crazy. Within weeks, everyone in the world knew their claims were real. People read the patents and replicated, and within months people improved on them. By 1911 the Scientific American reported that 500,000 people were working on airplanes. Nothing like this ever happened with cold fusion. There have never been more than a handful of people doing experiments, and most were not funded for more than a shoestring effort. (Except for IMRA France which made great progress, and projects like the NHE which was doomed from the start.) Cold fusion will never pan out unless we have thousands of people working on it, spending millions of dollars a day. There are too many ways to do it wrong and too many unanswered questions. It is inevitable that many projects will go off the rails and fail, like the NHE. That always happens with new technology.

It also took thousands of people to make transistors practical, and later computers and integrated circuits. It could never have been done on the small scale of cold fusion research. By the same token, the Wright brothers alone could never have made airplanes into practical devices. They had already reached the limits of their skills in 1908. The machines they had then uncontrollable deathtraps. They killed most of the early pilots. One of them nearly killed Orville Wright on Sept. 17, 1908, and it killed his passenger Lt. Selfridge.

There are no major technical limitations or technical reasons why cold fusion has not been made fully controllable and practical. It would have been done in a few years in the 1990s were it not for academic politics. It could be done now. Whether it ever will be done depends entirely on whether we can overcome politics, emotion, jealousy and stupidity.

If Russ George actually has the devices he describes, he could trigger the success of cold fusion by giving a few to an industrial corporation. If I thought his devices work as claimed, this would bother me. Because he has not given out samples and I doubt he ever will. Like Patterson and many others, I expect he will take his secrets to the grave. However, I think it is unlikely that he has anything, so I don't lose sleep regretting that we will never know. I expect he is making a mistake. People who think they have a successful cold fusion experiments but who are mistaken are a dime a dozen.

Quote from Alan Smith

As for the patent, there are quite a few cold fusion patents, why has no big effort sprung up to replicate those?

For the same reason no one tried to replicate the Wright's 1906 patent until late 1908. Because no one believed the claims. They thought the Wrights were lying or deluded.

(Another problem may be that these patents do not work. I wouldn't know about that. I am not familiar with the patents.)

The Charles Flint company believed the Wrights, and was arranging demonstrations and funding starting in 1907. That was the biggest venture capitalist in 1900. They started IBM and they financed fleets of battleships for mid-sized countries. It took them some time to get the project off the ground (literally). They had to push the Wrights to demonstrate for the French and the U.S. Army, in 1908. But after the demonstrations everything went smoothly. Except for people like Charles Rolls (of Rolls-Royce) and several dozen others killing themselves in Wright airplanes. The biggest of big names on Wall Street all bought in, and -- as I said -- by 1911 there were 500,000 people frantically working on airplanes. That's a good thing. If it had not happened, I expect Britain and France would have lost WWI.

Without a similar effort in cold fusion, involving thousands of people and millions of dollars a day, I think there is no chance it will be developed. All major technology has required that kind of effort, as far as I know.

Here is what Charles Flint himself had to say about the Wrights. Some of his facts and dates are a little off:

http://www.wright-brothers.org…s_Flint/Charles_Flint.htm

As the intro. says, "In this extract from his rambling memoirs, Flint remembers the Wright Brothers and their "aeroplane," and marvels that such a good idea with so much potential was such a hard sell." Cold fusion is also a good idea with more potential than any other discovery in history. It is a hard sell because of politics. Also, because many cold fusion researchers have hidden their work and prevented the public and other experts from knowing what they are up to. They are partly to blame, but they are more sinned against than sinning.

Many researchers complain they cannot communicate. They say all doors are closed to them. The journals will not publish their papers; the mass media calls them liars, criminals and lunatics. That is all true. But the doors are not closed. Thanks to the internet, and thanks to me, personally, the doors are fully open. I can deliver an audience of 200,000 readers a year for any well-written, useful cold fusion paper. Very few researchers have taken advantage of this. Mizuno's paper has attracted a number of serious replications. Many have failed so far, as reported here. Two that I know of have apparently succeeded. The successful ones want to keep their work confidential for now, but eventually I hope they will file for patents and go public.

As I said, most replications and most attempts to make technology will fail. That's why you need thousands of people working independently. That is also why a single project under the auspices of something like the DoE will never work. They will insist on one or two approaches. There are hundreds of possible approaches. Maybe thousands. It is extremely unlikely anyone at the DoE or anywhere else will pick the right approach. No matter how smart they are, that's not possible. When you develop something as radically new as cold fusion or self-driving cars, you would have to be omniscient to know what technology will work before you do the research and development. You can only predict success for incremental improvements to existing technology.

Quote from Bruce__H

It isn't vague. If you make claims then you publish in sufficient detail that people cam replicate (or not) your results.

The problem is that the recent history of LENR is that this is also a route self delusion and fraud.

I think it is a vague demand. What is SAFIRE going to publish? How to make an artificial sun? And who's going to try to replicate that? Do you think that just because SAFIRE spends a year trying to placate dis-believers in the EU by publishing something somewhere, that skeptics are going to suddenly embrace the project? It seems to me that it's an utter waste of time to publish for the goal of earning support of the scientific community, the vast majority of which scoffs at the very idea and would ignore not just one but dozens of potential papers if they existed.

I would argue that the edifice upon which "big bang" cosmology is constructed is itself the biggest exercise in self-delusion and fraud in the history of science. The mistakes CF researchers have made, toiling away on their own time with virtually no funding, pales by comparison.

But this is beside the point. Pseudo-skeptics like "Professor" Dave will always move the goalposts, no matter which hoops the target of his denigration jumps through. So screw him. You don't need his approval or the blessing of a largely oblivious community of non-believing scientists. Just build a damn device and let nature takes its course.

Quote from LenrdSkynrd

I think it is a vague demand. What is SAFIRE going to publish? How to make an artificial sun? And who's going to try to replicate that? Do you think that just because SAFIRE spends a year trying to placate dis-believers in the EU by publishing something somewhere, that skeptics are going to suddenly embrace the project? It seems to me that it's an utter waste of time to publish for the goal of earning support of the scientific community, the vast majority of which scoffs at the very idea and would ignore not just one but dozens of potential papers if they existed.

I would argue that the edifice upon which "big bang" cosmology is constructed is itself the biggest exercise in self-delusion and fraud in the history of science. The mistakes CF researchers have made, toiling away on their own time with virtually no funding, pales by comparison.

But this is beside the point. Pseudo-skeptics like "Professor" Dave will always move the goalposts, no matter which hoops the target of his denigration jumps through. So screw him. You don't need his approval or the blessing of a largely oblivious community of non-believing scientists. Just build a damn device and let nature takes its course.

I don't think one's principles should be determined by what skeptics say or do. "Just build" a device sounds good in theory, but most startups are there to prove a thesis and get backers - not to commercialize at industrial scale. That is what happens in all venture industries. M&A is more important for this area than IPO.

I admire Mills for his intense work ethic and showing that you can publish mainstream science whilst doing commercial R&D. I am sure he never in a million years expected that even with that, few physicists would not look at his data seriously. Still, you don't do what's right because of the whims of others.

I also think publishing science helps bring other important backers on board - who may otherwise not show up - be it granting agencies, angel investors, and other scientists.

Changing the world isn't easy, and we should always respect those willing to engage in the "Impossible" - it literally goes against all of our cultural / survival programming.

“With something like cold fusion, the market is so gigantic, and the applications so broad, thousands of industrial companies will go to any lengths to reverse engineer the devices. A trade secret will not last one month for cold fusion.”

I have real difficulty reconciling this statement with the contention that progress has been stymied by academic politics. In any battle between corporate greed and academic politics I can imagine, greed wins in a heartbeat.

Quote from interested observer

I have real difficulty reconciling this statement with the contention that progress has been stymied by academic politics. In any battle between corporate greed and academic politics I can imagine, greed wins in a heartbeat.

Read the history of cold fusion and you will see. Especially Beaudette's book.

Greed has not been triggered because investors do not realize cold fusion is real. They don't realize that because many prominent scientists, the DoE, Scientific American, Nature magazine and others have said it is not real. When an investor asks a scientist, or does a Google background check, he sees that cold fusion is fraud. The scientist, unfortunately, knows nothing and has read nothing, but he assumes that Nature is telling the truth -- because it is usually a reliable source of information.

The situation is similar to where the airplane was before the 1908 demonstrations. There were no investments in aviation because the Scientific American and other opinion leaders said heavier than air aviation did not exist, and the Wright brothers were "liars, not flyers."

If it became generally known that cold fusion is real, I am sure greed would overcome the academic politics immediately, as you suggest.