Reg Edwards wrote:
Roy, you are a pessimist.

In my career doing electronic instrumentation product development, I
learned to look for all the potential problems I could think of, as
early as possible. A lot of them turned out to be non-problems, and
could then be ignored. But the ones which were real had to be overcome,
or at least had to have a good probility of being overcome, before the
project could proceed. If it couldn't be, another approach usually had
to be found or the project abandoned -- or at the very least an
alternative approach had to be identified in case the problem couldn't
be overcome. Too often, a naive ("optimistic") project manager wouldn't
do this, and would run into a project-killing problem 90% of the way
into the project. That can be a disaster, and I've seen it happen many
times. Of course, it's ok to go into a project knowing there's a
potential program-stopper, as long as you know it up front and are
willing to accept the consequences if it can't be overcome. This is the
approach often taken by startup companies, but the high risk of failure
is too often conceled from the suckers, um, investors. A great number of
announcements of revolutionary technology tend to ignore, deny, or
minimize potential problems, limitations, and risks. So I don't consider
it pessimistic at all to assume they exist. Once in a while, the serious
problems are overcome and a new and useful technology emerges. More
often, nothing emerges but a lot of investors with thinner wallets and
more critical outlooks.

I really hope the nano-tubes will bring us amazingly high Q coils. Then
all we'll have to do is figure out how to keep them far away from
anything else. Gee, maybe some new magical field-masking technology will
emerge in the nick of time to solve that problem. There, was that better?

Roy Lewallen, W7EL