Well it's not easy to do multi disciplinary research on a completely new phenomenon without funding.
I'd just like to comment on this line. It presupposes at least two misconceptions.
Firstly, is the misconception that Cold Fusion, and it's related "phenomena", haven't received any funding. That's just plain false. Companies like Blacklight Power have received tens of millions of dollars in funding from investment sources. Researchers in Japan have had funding pretty much continuously since the first reports of cold fusion in the 80s. Even agencies like the
US Navy's SPAWAR funded research into cold fusion for
decades.
So the claim that they haven't had funding is just wrong.
But there's a second, slightly hidden misconception. That is, that the funding we've seen just
wasn't enough to research something like cold fusion.
Except that's wrong, too.
Science doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to be cutting edge. Sure, things like the accelerator research at CERN is expensive; it has to be. Digging a miles-long tunnel in the ground, lining it with accelerators and detectors, and employing enough technicians, engineers and scientists to make it all work is pretty damn expensive.
But that's not what we see in even the most popular Cold Fusion research, the experiments proponents of cold fusion constantly point to to support their claims. All that takes is a bench top setup with some metal powders and some hydrogen inputs, and a little electricity. A few simple detectors that pretty much every university lab already has on hand. A few researchers at most. Maybe a lab tech or student do do the grunt work. Stuff that could be funded for at most hundreds of thousands of dollars, and probably much less. Back when I was a student, the average research grant in Canada was much less that a hundred thousand dollars, and yet, scientists all over the country produced useful work.
But despite that, Cold Fusioneers, doing experiments no more (and quite often, much less) complicated than what I saw at university, despite millions in annual funding, have not produced even one unequivocally positive result.
It's likely
not any lack of funding that's causing that.
