Each attempt to replicate will cause a random variation in many conditions, some of which are important to causing LENR and some are not. Success in causing LENR would result only when the important condition just happened to be produced. This approach is not science. It is more like playing the lottery.
I would say it is more like the methods used to develop pre-modern technology. Which is to say, most of the technology you see around you. People discovered iron, steel, Damascus steel and countless other materials without any knowledge of science. The entire city of Rome, the aqueducts, and all medieval cathedrals were built without science. It was not simply trial and error. They understood the rules in great depth. The people who built aqueducts and cathedrals knew a lot about stones, such as how much weight different kinds of stone can bear, whether they will be crushed or erode over time, how to cut and shape them without damaging them, and so on. But they did not understand the underlying rules behind the rules. The best example of this in modern times was genetics before the discovery of DNA in 1953. People knew a TERRIFIC amount about genetics. There is a book published in 1916 with hundreds of pages of accurate information, describing how different genes are on different chromosomes, how they interact, which is dominant or recessive, and so on:
Castle, W.E., Genetics and Eugenics. 1916: Harvard University Press. (Copies available online)
They understood all of that without any knowledge of the mechanism at the chemical or atomic level.
The method is not trial and error, and it is not blindly shooting in the dark, but it is very time consuming. If enough money and effort were put into the project, I think that people might be able to develop effective cold fusion heat sources without knowledge of the atomic physics. This would take far more money, effort and time than it would with a theory, but I think it could be done, because so much else was done without theory. It would be more art than science, but it would still work.
Even the Wright Brothers did not attempt to exactly duplicate their design after each experiment, as you made clear earlier. They learned from their experience and used this knowledge to improve each following effort.
The Wright brothers did all of their work with Newtonian physics and engineering, with very complex mathematics and modeling, but without any deep knowledge of things that are now considered essential to aviation science, such as how wings produce lift. See T. Crouch, "The Bishop’s Boys," page 175. Quote:
Engineering was the key. The Wright brothers functioned as engineers, not scientists. Science, the drive to understand the ultimate principles at work in the universe, had little to do with the invention of the airplane. A scientist would have asked the most basic questions. How does the wing of a bird generate lift? What are the physical laws that explain the phenomena of flight?
The answers to those questions were not available to Wilbur and Orville Wright, or to anyone else at the turn of the century. Airplanes would be flying for a full quarter century before physicists and mathematicians could
explain why wings worked.
How was it possible to build a flying machine without first understanding the principles involved? In the late twentieth century, we regard the flow of technological marvels from basic scientific research as the natural order of things. But this relationship between what one scholar, Edwin Layton, has described as the “mirror image twins” of science and technology is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, technological advance has more often preceded and even inspired scientific understanding.
