[ahadams2]

but...but...what about photon torpedoes?? and light sabers??? what about them???!!!!

[Husker24]

Although Herrmannsfeldt regards claims for hafnium-178's super-energy powers as nonsense, he fears that other nations will take them seriously, triggering a new arms race.

Lets get this straight, he says they wont work, but he worries that other nations will build them.

[swilhelm73]

So, has anyone actually gotten ahold of a dental x-ray machine and tried to duplicate the original work? Or have they all just followed the theory - with wildly different equipment - and failed to reproduce it?

It may well be that there is something specific to the equipment Collins was using.

[kimosabe31]

bump

[Travis McGee]

Science ping. (Let me know what you bright guys decide.)

[LPM1888]

Collins himself has a weighty reputation. A decade earlier, the Texas Academy of Sciences had named him "Distinguished Texas Scientist" of the year for his research on high-energy lasers.

That title and a $1.00 will get you a cup of coffee any place in town.

If Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs can't verify his experiment then we damned sure don't need to be wasting any more money on the effort.

[Flightdeck]

I guarantee that the US defense research community is welcomming the skepticism. It only disinvites other capable researchers from investigating what might potentially be a breakthrough. Even if Jason's recommendation is officially taken, there is a budget for this type of thing.

[TLI]

One possible way would involve bombarding elements in a giant particle accelerator, then developing a tedious process for extracting the hafnium-178 nuclear isomer.

 

Let's see, where can we find a rather large partical accelerator... hummm... oh yea, TEXA... oops, no, that got pi$$ed away.

Oh well.

[RLK]

"In my opinion, this matter is worse than cold fusion,"

-------------------

Cold fusion has been shown to occur reproduceably in numerous experiments.

[thegreatbeast]

There is no sorting out of politics anymore. This might just be communists bitching about not being able to get back to Never-Neverland. Some investigation , some experimentation is certainly in order.

[WaterDragon]

I have no idea how this is going to come out, but it's a fact that every new discovery by scientists has been denounced as 'nonsense' by plenty of other scientists.