Martin Fleischmann Quotes

“I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.”

“One of my theme songs is that if you can’t do it in a test tube, don’t do it.”

“I have had this view of the optimization of the electrode design for a long time. Historically we went through various phases in the work and eventually worked on large sheets – very large sheets – of palladium.”

“If you assume that it was a valid experiment, then its disintegration reveals a very substantial part of what has been found since then, including the fact that you can get heat generation at high temperature.”

“It is not necessarily true that expensive experiments are not worthwhile doing but there are plenty of rather cheap experiments which are certainly worth doing.”

“Now Stan and I were still working in secret at that time but, because of this development, we had to inform the University of Utah because we thought that they might need to take patent protection.”

“Stan and I funded the first phase of the work ourselves. It was secret.”

“Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around – it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.”

“Now, of course, cold fusion is the daddy of them all in a way, in terms of value, so I think that viewed in a social way, from the point of social considerations and economics, it will tell you that this thing will stay around.”

“I don’t know whether you have done your calculations but, about two or three years back, I did a first assessment of what the first successful device would be worth and it came out at about 300 trillion dollars.”

“Scientists are really very conscious of the fact that they stand on the shoulders of an enormous tree of preceding workers and that their own contribution is not so enormous.” 

“So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways – four major potential lines of research.”

“The problem is that replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding.”

“You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll ever retire completely.”

Martin died a few years back, rest in peace dear friend.