We need each other (theorists & accidential experimenters) to bring about a successful outcome for LENR/Cold Fusion, advancements are just around the corner!
Let's upgrade our vision of the future of LENR/Cold Fusion from the glass being half empty to the glass being half full.
Some advancements are created by theory and then an experiment carried out to prove it.
Some advancements are created by "accident' and then theory comes in to describe the advancement.
10 Inventions That Changed The World, But Were Made By Mistake
http://www.storypick.com/inventions-made-by-mistake/
Also
The Accidental Inventor
http://discovermagazine.com/1996/oct/theaccidentalinv893
Christopher Columbus of chemists, set boldly forth to discover a new
technology of refrigeration. Luckily, he screwed up and invented Teflon instead.
Roy Plunkett was only 27 years old and had been working as a chemist at the
Jackson Laboratory at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company for just two years when,
in the spring of 1938, he made a discovery that brought him lasting fame.
He had been trying to invent a new type of Freon, a class of compounds that in
the 1930s were proving to be immensely useful as the principal gases in
refrigerators and air conditioners. Today we call them chlorofluorocarbons,
or cfcs, and know them to be a major culprit in depleting the atmosphere’s
ozone layer, but back then they were miracle substances--safe, nonflammable
substitutes for toxic and even explosive refrigerants.
On an April morning 58 years ago, the young chemist could not have suspected
that he was about to discover a material with such strange and unexpected properties
that they had hardly even been dreamed of, a material that would eventually
become an indispensable part of everything from space capsules to heart valves
to frying pans--and one that had absolutely nothing to do with refrigeration.
Roy Plunkett was about to discover Teflon.
The importance of Plunkett’s story, however, lies not so much in the triumph of
invention and commercialization as in what it suggests about the nature of invention
itself. Invention is often thought of as systematic problem solving, the kind that
supposedly goes on at the well-manicured campuses of corporate research
laboratories. In fact, many important inventions arose, and continue to arise,
from the creative use of an accident or mistake. This is a unique and somewhat
neglected form of creativity, every bit as ingenious and awesome as the more deliberate sort.
Much of the act of invention is shrouded in mystery, to be sure.
Even when people set out to act purposefully and rationally, they wind up
doing things they did not intend. In principle, the accident or the unexpected
obstacle that gives rise to a creative invention is not all that different from the
unexpected traffic jam that forces us to drive through a new and interesting
neighborhood, the pesky weed that turns out to enhance our garden’s variety,
or the empty shelf at the supermarket that spurs us to improvise a new recipe.
But in practice, events like Plunkett’s are far fewer, and we cannot help asking
ourselves: What makes it possible to turn the unlooked-for chance into novel
fortune? Not surprisingly, we find a subtle interplay of individual and
surroundings: a mind supple enough to turn a screwup into a creative
opportunity, and an environment that makes such creativity possible.............
................The knack for serendipity may turn out to be the investor's most important talent.
To some degree, the contrasting reputations of these two scientists
underscore how the prejudices and styles of science and technology
were evolving in the middle of the twentieth century. Whereas
Plunkett proceeded by luck and serendipity, Flory took the high road of
theoretical and systematic methodology, upon which corporate
research laboratories increasingly sought to rely. With his stature
and influence in the scientific community, Flory embodied the
growing prestige attached to theoretical science. Roy Plunkett’s
relative obscurity showed how far technological creativity had come
to be seen as an almost purely corporate, communal activity.