Peter Gluck (IIMT)+{}, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
+{Institute for Isotope and Molecular Technology}
Peter Brian Medawar, Novel Prize for medicine 1960, has defined an optimal zone in the coordinates degree of difficulty vs. profitability of a research theme. For too low a degree of difficulty, the solutions are almost trivial and it is not in accordance with a professional researcher's dignity to waste time with easy problems. On the opposite, right side of the Medawar zone the obstacles are too great, the risks are too high, and the associates are too few. And the hostility of the scientific community toward those daring too much, aiming too high, is overwhelming. At the right side of the Medawar Zone, it is a "Terra incognita" or a kind of Far West with other rules or without the usual scientific rules.
After many, over 30 years of diligent work in the Medawar Zone where I focused on technological development and where I gained the belief in the force of progress, in the October (or November?) month of my life I moved to the right side to the Medawar Zone and gave dedicated my residual intellectual energies to an extremely controversial subject: cold fusion.
Almost ten years have lapsed, and no final victory came, the problems are widely open, no final proof is here, no global theory of understanding of the field was elaborated. Strange facts have accumulated, many devices have been created and we are yet at the border of a new scientific field, a different, so diversified, so difficult! The successes are the continuous phase in a terrible dispersion with rock-like failures and the curse of bad reproducibility is a ubiquitous menace for the cold fusion experimenter.
I personally think that the root of troubles and the start point of the final solution for Cold Fusion is its inherent catalytic nature: all the unexpected and highly desirable phenomena take place in very limited active areas, and the research strategy is to breed and multiply and reinforce and enhance these active areas.
I see the solution coming from such systems as the Arata-Zhang composed cathode or from the cavitational devices where active and collapsing bubbles are working in the frame of a sub-generic technical 'renaissance'.
Painful disillusion and dramatic events made life interesting in this area, but one of the greatest rewards, most precious assets I got there is; friends. And Hideo Kozima, heroically fighting as his name predicts, is one of the best friends I ever had. We met at Minsk at a CF congress, he spoke about his fine-trapped neutron catalyzed model, which is related but in the same time not identical with my catalytic concept. But who cares, I discovered that Hideo is, besides being a great scientist, what we call a great guy, a human being of an immense richness of soul and culture and feelings, profoundly Japanese and perfectly universal, aiming to the highest cultural values.
We got friends and later he became the friend of my whole family. When he visited us, my daughter Antonia has subscribed to an introductory course of Japanese language and, that's great! Here she met her husband. Therefore, Hideo is their godfather. Hideo gave a lecture about cold fusion at our Institute and, even if he couldn't convince my skeptic colleagues about a new rich reality, his contribution was remarkable.
I hope Hideo and I will be present at the start of the new era of energetics, when cold fusion will be taught in the school and will move in the very middle of the Medawar Zone. However, a new generation of scientist will start a new intellectual adventure, far right of it.