Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot??
May I ask what general field inquiry you work in, and what "discoveries" and effects you have obtained?
No need to reveal proprietary info or trade secrets, just a general outline/framework so we can understand?
Thanks
Dave
I won't go into a lot of detail here but I'm now retired. I got into some of this in an earlier post. I have a PhD in chemistry from SUNYAB. Most of the R&D I did was not of the exotic type. It was mainly material formulating in industries where getting patents was usually not done. Put in simple terms, you test various combos of materials to find one that produces the desired effect. I was mainly in the areas of cleaning, corrosion prevention and lubrication. As often as not there was poor understanding of why a particular combination worked. And the company usually didn't really care as long as they could make money from it. For some of the more spectacular finds we had no clue as to why they were successful.
I will tell you this story. At one point I changed jobs and went with a company called Chem Trend in 1977. It was started in the 1960's by a chemist named Peer Lorentzen who had immigrated from Denmark. This company had grown very quickly and it was obvious that Lorentzen was a rich man by the time I came along. What wasn't so obvious at first, was how he got so rich. For the more I got to know about his technology, the more I realized how primitive it was. But then I realized he had a cunning knack for ruthlessness. He got people to buy mold release agents that were way over priced even though they were of simple composition. And I learned there had been a long line of people who had been hired and fired by Peer after he'd picked their brains. I was one of the fortunate ones who got out before I was fired, even though within a month I had developed a water based concrete mold release agent that Peer and his staff had been struggling to develop for years.
So here's Peer, a not so good practical chemist, and I come along with a large collection of materials and methods that have proven useful, spectacular in some cases, in improving formulated products. But as to the why of all this, I had little or no understanding in many cases. This infuriated Peer, for he had to have a complete understanding of why the materials/methods worked. For him, this had mostly been possible within the simple minded technology of the usual Chem Trend product.
I vividly recall a specific solvent butyl cellosolve (bc), a member of the large class of glycol ether type industrial solvents. Prior to Chem Trend it became very clear to me, and other chemists I'd worked with, that this was generally the most useful of the glycol ethers. This was mainly for its solubilizing and stabilizing effects in products, but for other reasons as well. We realized some basis for its effectiveness, but our understanding was very incomplete.
bc was in a product I had developed for Peer and had to discuss in a meeting. Peer rejected it out of hand because he couldn't understand why it worked - said it was not polar enough. Nor could I give him an explanation as to why it worked so well.
My point of all this is that here was a product I had developed, and where there was no question that it met all performance objectives, yet was rejected (by Peer) because he couldn't understand all the interworkings.
To me, E-cat, as it relates to many posters on this forum, is a little like what I experienced with Peer, and others for that matter. Please know that I'm not sold on E-cat. The jury is still out as far as I'm concerned. But to reject it out of hand because it can't be explained by the theories of modern physics is, I feel, a mistake.
) are in a far more advantageous frame-of-mind to spot fakery than Scientists and other "experts".