Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The long running Rossi E-CAT cold fusion saga may be about to collapse in a heap of lawsuits, with accusations flying, of intellectual property theft and fraudulent energy technology claims. The dispute appears to centre around the non-payment of an $89 million licensing fee, upon successful completion of a $11 million e-cat test. Industrial Heat claims E-cat does not work, and they are therefore refusing to pay any additional money.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C., April 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — We are aware of the lawsuit filed by Andrea Rossi and Leonardo Corporation against Industrial Heat. Industrial Heat rejects the claims in the suit. They are without merit and we are prepared to vigorously defend ourselves against this action. Industrial Heat has worked for over three years to substantiate the results claimed by Mr. Rossi from the E-Cat technology – all without success. Leonardo Corporation and Mr. Rossi also have repeatedly breached their agreements. At the conclusion of these proceedings we are confident that the claims of Mr. Rossi and Leonardo Corporation will be rejected.
Industrial Heat continues to be focused on a scientifically rigorous approach that includes thorough, robust and accurate testing of promising LENR technologies. Our goal remains to deliver clean, safe and affordable energy.
SOURCE Industrial Heat, LLC
New Energy Times, a news outlet dedicated to low energy fusion news, is scathing in its criticism of Rossi and his E-Cat.
Andrea Rossi, a convicted white-collar criminal with a string of failed energy ventures, is suing Thomas Darden, JT Vaughn, and their affiliated companies Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, Industrial Heat LLC, and IPH International B.V. for fraud. Rossi is accusing them of stealing his intellectual property.
Judging by all available facts known to New Energy Times, although Rossi and his Leonardo Corp. may have some patents and patent applications, there is no evidence that he has any working system that can produce commercially relevant amounts of excess heat based on what is contained in Rossi’s published intellectual property.
According to the complaint, Industrial Heat had paid Rossi $11 million for a license to what he calls his Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat, an assembly of copper pipes that he says can produce 1 megawatt of commercially useful excess heat from low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs). Attorney John Annesser, with the Silver Law Group in Islamorada, Florida, is representing Rossi. Annesser has been licensed for four years. Before that, he worked as a general contractor.
According to the license agreement, Industrial Heat was supposed to pay Rossi another $89 million after the successful completion of a one-year operating test in February 2016. Some of the accusations in the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, appear suspicious.
The full text of Rossi’s lawsuit is here (courtesy of New Energy Times).
The original Fleischmann cold fusion efforts were an attempt to produce conventional nuclear fusion reactions in an unconventional way – to use an electrically stressed platinum Palladium lattice to create the extreme compression required to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction.
There is an expected radiation signature of nuclear fusion reactions – emission of fast neutrons. Nuclear fusion production of neutrons is so prolific, that many commercial neutron generators actually use a nuclear fusion core as the source of radiation.
Although Fleischmann’s experiments were never satisfactorily replicated, Fleischmann’s original claim included detection of helium and neutron fusion products.
Rossi took his claims in a different direction. Rossi explained the lack of radiation from his E-Cat, by claiming he is harnessing new type of nuclear reaction, which uses the weak nuclear force (conventional fusion uses the strong nuclear force).
We all hope that one day nuclear fusion power plants will be possible (Nuclear fusion for other purposes, such as neutron generation, is already very possible, and has been for a long time). I am a fusion optimist – I believe the fusion power problem is on the verge of being solved.
Rossi’s exotic explanations about how his apparatus produces nuclear energy without radiation leave me cold. If I am wrong, Rossi will receive an abject personal apology, which most likely would be lost in the vast snowdrift of personal fan mail he would undoubtably receive. But at this point in time, I am very skeptical of Rossi’s claims.
Update (EW): The Fleischmann experiment used a Palladium electrode, not Platinum (h/t Steamboat McGoo)
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This is for electricity which is only part of the energy picture. Takes a long extension cord for all those 18 wheelers traversing I-10, 1-40, 1-70, I-80.
It’s my understanding that the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project and others have successfully replicated the e-cat.
https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/
It’s my understanding that the Memorial Project have successfully replicated the e-scam. What they are demonstrating is an elaborate network of paper pipes and obfuscation reactors through which money is channeled from the gullible to the mischievous and the deluded.
The x-rays are really hard to explain absent some sort of exotic LENR. More replication is needed, though.
Nope, x-rays are easy. Just need a large voltage potential with a gap – accelerate electrons across the gap, and watch what happens when they hit the positive electrode at high speed – they have to shed excess energy as high energy photons: x-rays. We used to have to add metal foil shielding to vacuum tubes inside televisions to keep the x-ray exposure rate low enough for the consumer.
Talldave2 there are no x-rays coming from Rosssi’s e-scrap. You are probably confusing x-rays with gamma “rays”. If Rossi’s junk was working at all there WOULD be gammas but there aren’t(he told Florida Bureau of Radiation Control this when questioned) and so it isn’t(there are many other things that also tell us that there are no nuclear reactions).
Rossi is a serial conman. Below is a small exerpt from a site with large amounts of material on the despicable operations of Rossi. Many people are proffiting from Rossi’s crime.
http://freeenergyscams.com/andrea-rossis-e-cat-project-began-with-intentional-false-and-misleading-statements/
I got suckered in by Rossi when he was demonstrating the dirt simple small unit at the University of Milan (IIRC) a few years ago… I was 90% there, just needed that promised demo. The claims were straightforward and he chose to demo in front of physicists… made big claims, but every simple demo was short, not steady state, and rather than actually demo the core technology (such as it was) every subsequent demo was more and more involved with more and more places to hide heat and make a precise calorimetry impossible. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In his defense, it’s quite possible he fooled himself first and now just can’t let it go. As Barbie might say, “Calorimetry is hard!”.
No it really isn’t. When you examine the evidence it is clear that it was a knowing fr@ud right from the start. See scads of material at the links below.
http://freeenergyscams.com/andrea-rossis-e-cat-project-began-with-intentional-false-and-misleading-statements/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/&gws_rd=cr&ei=G_IOV7K8MIan0ASo3qG4BA
MIt and JET energy have the NANOR.
It seems as though there rae many replication of the technology so I dont know what is up. Unless MIT is a fraud as well…
WHY COLD FUSION IS FALSE
Almost by definition, true nuclear fusion cannot proceed at low energies. Unlike uranium or plutonium Fission, Fusion is actually a specific nuclear reaction with a defined product. For example, one reaction favored for fusion is one isotope of hydrogen (deuterium, with one proton + one neutron) reacting with the nucleus of another hydrogen isotope (tritium, with one proton and two neutrons), in order to produce helium-4 and an 14.7 million electron volt neutron. Cockcroft and Walton won the Noble Prize in the late 1930s for using this reaction to produce energetic neutrons for research. This is about the lowest energy fusion-type reaction, but still requires over 100,000 volts to occur. (The temperature equivalent to 100 kv is a very high temperature.) Even this reaction between H-2 and H-3 is possible only because the quantum probability cloud about the protons extend farther from the proton than does the effective Coulomb (charge) barrier that repels the protons.
But Rossi’s E-Cat is not about cold fusion like Flieschmann claimed back in the 80’s; it’s about LENR. They are not the same.
You’ve got your figures somewhat wrong there. D-T fusion requires as little as 10-15kV of electrostatic acceleration. The main problem with electrostatic fusion is that the collision x-section is very small, thus the chances of an accelerated pair of ions colliding are too low to produce sufficient fusion events such that energy output exceeds electrical energy input. That is, unless you can devise a clever way to confine them, without losing kinetic energy, until they do eventually collide. If your confinement system bends the path of the ions though, you then have energy losses due to bremsstrahlung effects. The trick is to keep these losses under control whilst containing the fast-moving ions for long enough to produce a net energy gain.
Anyway. that’s hot fusion. LENR may work on an entirely different principle. Its mechanism is presently not fully understood, so it is pointless to assume that the rules applying to hot plasma physics must necessarily apply there.
Well the Physics Dept. I grew up in, actually had a 600 KeV Cockroft-Walton accelerator, and the used it to shoot deuterons, at a heavy ice target frozen onto a spinning Copper heat sink (for cooling). And we got plenty of 14 MeV neutrons, which were used by other researchers in polarized scattering experiments. I actually built a stilbene crystal scintillation detector to detect those neutrons, and discriminate between them and gamma rays (electrons) or alpha particles.
The proportional gas counters the other researchers were using, were insensitive to gammas, but very low efficiency for 14 MeV neutrons. My detector was 10^4 times as efficient for neutrons, but also counted the gammas.
I discriminated between the particles by simultaneously measuring the peak pulse height, as well as the pulse area, for every individual pulse. The area to pulse height ration increased with charged particle mass (electron for the gamma, knock on proton for the neutron, and alpha particle for those.
The photo-multiplier anode current pulse was integrated on a capacitor, to measure the pulse area, and an inverted smaller signal was taken from the last dynode with a fast pulse amplifier to measure the pulse height.
Analog electronics computed the ratio, and accepted only pulses with the correct ratio for neutrons.
So maybe if the D-T reaction works at 100 keV Deuteron energy, the D-D one would also work at 600 keV
G
Ian, the D-T collision may be low probability, But the D-D reaction using pure D2O (ice)for the target gives plenty of neutrons, at least for polarized neutron scattering experiments, but not necessarily for power generation.
G
There is a fusion approach using muons to replace the electrons in the reacting atoms. Because the muons are more massive than electrons, their spatial distribution has a reduced radius, allowing the nuclei to approach close enough for the strong force to push the fusion reaction. The problem, however, is that there is no practical way to regenerate the muons to sustain the reaction…but the process exists, and it is not “hot” fusion.
A cat can be either dead or alive, not some combination or partial thing.
With a lot of money to be made if “E-Cat” is alive Industrial Heat would not walk away.
They have walked away.
The cat is dead.
Beat me to it.
Industrial Heat was poised to make billions if this thing worked.
But what about Schrödinger’s cat
They opened the box.
And apparently found a dead cat, when they were expecting a live one.
I think we would all love to have the benefits of a true fusion reactor. Oil companies will of course be the villains that will be accused of “stopping” it. I wonder why that is though, wouldn’t the products we all live with on a daily basis such as plastics, not keep them financially happy?. I have wondered for a long time what it is that is stopping fusion from being advanced to the point it becomes viable. I for one hopes it happens sooner than later but scams ( as it appears this one is), will only slow down the development.
How long has the “big oil” suppression conspir@cy theory been running?
This has always been the favourite justification for marginalization and excuse for failure, from the innumerable “free energy” generator and engine run on water ho@xsters throughout probably the best part the last century.
And – now the global hockey-stick and alarm generator ho@xstards have picked up the baton and are manufacturing the same pisspoor groundless Men In Black, X-Files standard delusional tin-foilisms as an excuse for their crap statistics and the failure of their predictions.
Thank you for putting it bluntly.
and all the left objection to “big oil” financed by ……The Rockefeller Foundation?????
Of course, the gigantic flaw in any argument against oil companies is that their fuels ARE NOT USED TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY THESES DAYS AND THEREFORE THEY ARE NOT IN COMPETITION WITH ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEMS. Batteries, yes, but note that everybody and his brother is and has been trying to build a better battery for years, all without the slightest hindrence from the oil companies. Lithium batteries are NEARLY affordable at this point and I just read that GM’s Bolt all electric coming out next year will be able to recharge to 80% in FIVE MINUTES. If the price is right (the car will retail around $33K) that’s the ball game, gasoline lovers. Aside from battery issues, an electric car is far superior to a gas powered job in terms of cost to built, cost to maintain, cost to operate. Henry Ford’s wife always drove an electric car and if there had been a practical battery back then, no one would ever have created a gasoline powered vehicle, except perhaps for large trucks.
Electric cars are never going to be practical. It is a market for gizmo lovers.
I worked in the power industry and love making electricity. The power industry would love to take some market share. One nuke plant could replace gasoline for a million cars. Making electricity to meet demand is not a problem.
Everything arthur said is BS. How do I know I am not wrong? I am an engineer in the power industry. If the ICE was not superior for transportation, I would be driving an electric car.
This the same reason I know the E-cat does not work. If it worked, the power industry would be building them to replace boiler and nuclear reactors to supply steam to the turbine.
Good engineers understand the science behind their field of engineering. It is easy to dupe a general contractor. Modern (nuclear) physics is not something they understand.
To recharge to 80% in 5 minutes will take a HUGE current flow, somewhere on the order of 200 to 300 amps.
MarkW – April 8, 2016 at 10:09 am
To charge a 30 KWh battery to 80% in 5 minutes requires a delivery rate of 288KW. A 480 volt service would require 600 Amps. And that assumes no losses in the whole system – from the 480 volt line to the charge in the battery. Losses will drive up the amps required.
Even if the power supply were there, there is one heck of a cooling problem. LiIon charging is not efficient, and the loss is expressed as heat. Volt battery is 90%. Bolt is an evolved Volt pouch cell battery from LGChem with slightly higher energy density based on modified cathode materials licensed from Argonne. Rapid charging implies very high power density. That can be done (Saft built some for F1 hybrids) but they had less than 1/5 the Volt energy density. I suspect your 5 minute to 80% is wrong, unless the starting point is maybe half charged. No way from 10%.
I still remember claims about a 100-mpg carburetor that was sitting in the vaults of one oil company or another.
Here in 2016 we still have people being duped into believing that a gizmo that uses a cars battery to split water into O2 and H2 can increase mileage by then feeding the H2 back into the fuel mix as “free” power.
I had to talk to one of my own technicians a few years back when he was going to buy one, and he is no fool.
Just not schooled in thermodynamics and entropy and such related concepts.
That ones still floating around with some of the “chemtrails, man” types. Had one at work a few years ago and I just asked him if big oil is preventing me from plugging a laptop into my trucks EFI computer and changing it to get even better mileage than the 100 mpg carb. (I know I’d have to burn an EPROM but he didn’t) Actually might have gotten through to the one brain cell not completely marinated with THC, he seemed perplexed for a while.
All available evidence is that opposition to fusion comes from groups supporting wind and solar energy. Greenpeace for one have campaigned for fusion funding to be transferred to windturbine building.
The statistics are interesting. I have seen various estimates for the global expenditure on wind and solar, ranging from $200bn to a trillion USD a year. The cost of developing fusion would likely be only a small fraction of that amount. Once, not yearly. Yet, the expenditure on fusion research isn’t even in the same ballpark. In the UK, it’s next to nothing. That is why fusion is going nowhere fast.
Things are a lot less clear than you make them out to me. Two comments:
1) Rossi’s early response is at http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/04/08/rossi-responds-to-ih-statement/ be sure to to take it with many grains of salt, but what Rossi says is consistent with what he’s said since starting the partnership with IH.
2) http://news.newenergytimes.net/ is about as upstanding an outfit as realclimate.org is. Steve Krivit has had nothing good to say about anything related to Rossi for years, and Rossi has just about as little good to say about Krivit. Sure, Krivit may be right. RealClimate may be right too.
About the only thing that is certain at this point is that there’s a lot of popcorn to be popped.
RW, I wrote about this in The Arts of Truth. Rossi always was a scam. Original claim was cold fusion of hydrogen and nickel into copper. Supplied spent fuel for analysis. Whoops, wrong copper isotopes. Faked. Rossi switched to “LENR” when it was pointed out the absence of fast neutrons (proof, Rossi is still alive) meant there was no strong force fusion going on as he originally claimed.
LENR, on the other hand is a real lab level physics phenomenon now replicated reliably in various ways (sufficient heat to micro melt palladium and nickel, transmutations) at several labs. Even been a symposium at CERN. Based on weak force, not strong force. Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger intuited the mechanism back in 1993. Analog to sonoluminescence, which is very real. In 2007? Widom and Larsen published a paper fleshing out the details. Paper also explains why PF approach sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. depends on random microstructure wire defects. What is not known is whether it can be brought out of the lab to be anything useful. The NASA lab approach using laser induced phonons on a MEMS ‘defect’ surface is NOT scalable. Neither is the Navy approach using sputtering plus electric fields to produce dendritic ‘defects’.
Third of three examples in the Recognition chapter of Arts of Truth.
Looks like Industrial Heat paid Rossi $11 million to sue it. 🙂
Yeah, and when the counter-suing and counter-counter-suing etc is all completed – and they all check their pockets for cash, then they will discover that they became magically rich, as the money “flowed around the system”.
That is how free energy, pyramid/ponzi schemes and Keynesian economics work, isn’t it?
Yup. Plus many.
For the past several days we have been waiting for the big announcement. It was supposed to be a moment when the world changed. I am a bit disappointed, but not surprised. It was, after all, a real stretch that a system would work as claimed. Now we have the big announcement, and all we have is another lawsuit and allegations of fra*d and theft flying all around.
I agree with John F. – The E-Cat is dead, but not cold fusion. Although, given the history of this thing and the personalities involved, we may well see E-Cat re-emerge as a zombie or some other form of undead. It may well plague the lands for some time to come.
I would hate to see research into low energy fusion discontinued. Some very interesting ideas have emerged in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroelectric_fusion
Au contraire mon ami. If the hypesters leave the field, involuntarily or not, that will open it up for those doing real science on a very interesting anomaly. One less over hyped project is not a loss. Letting some calmer heads do the talking like Dr. Peter Hagelstein and Dr. Mitchell Swartz instead of Rossi will do the field a world of good.
There is a massive heat spike that we can’t explain yet and maybe it will never be tapped into for a source of energy but there is much to be learned.
Well, the main reason Pons and Fleischmann’s work was discredited was that they published too soon, without having confirmation of their results. They have since been proven correct. Rossi may be a little premature in going industrial with the E-cat. From what I understand it does produce excess energy, but not continuously, and is a bit temperamental to get working. That kind of setup is of no use to industry, and therein lies the problem of going industrial too soon.
That’s part of it. The main problem was pointed out about six months after they announced their claims it was pointed out at a large physics conference in the US that their experimental setup was incapable of performing the necessary calorimetry. Instead of measuring total heat, they were only measuring hot spots.
Also remember that palladium forms one of the electromotive series. For two theorists with little experimental experience, this would have been an easy mistake to make.
” …to use an electrically stressed platinum lattice…”
That should be Palladium.
Updated, thanks.
Snake oil salesmen and charlatans have existed for all human history and prehistory, and will into the future as long as humans breathe and hope.
Our hopes and biases abett their very nature and permit their predatory existence. It is our weakness and also our greatest strength, to see beyond the obvious in hopes that just one will prevail. The movie series Matrix probed this curiosity of human existance.
Sometimes one person does find a path forward where countless others forged deadends. Much of man’s early knowledge of chemistry and metalurgy came from alchemists. They developed empirical protocols that made alloys and metals we still use today. Today we know the theory, back 400 yrs or more ago, they only “knew” fire, water, air, and earth.
But today we do know about nuclear structures, the standard model, and its proscribed forces for a nucleus and nucleons. So until we see high energy neutrons from supposed fusion events, …this is all a load of hooey.
That’s because they were observant enough to know when they had found something.
The best way to find important breakthroughs is a search for novelty. In other words, keep trying different things. The problem is that when you do stumble over a breakthrough, it will be different than you thought it would be. You have to be able to recognize what you have found. Here’s a list of accidental discoveries. The list of discoveries that have been missed is, of course, infinite.
Most people think that if they try hard enough they can reach the goal of finding some kind of breakthrough. In fact, the goal oriented approach is most likely to fail. The observant and the curious are more likely to achieve breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs won’t be what they were looking for in the first place.
We need much more focus on curiosity-driven basic research and less on mission-driven research.
So, you think John Kerry begging researchers for a huge breakthrough is not the little push that solar needed to make it into the big leagues?
I would bet against it.
Don Lancaster wrote about electronics and inventing for many years. He advised that, if people had been working on something for a long time, your chances of coming up with a groundbreaking invention were approximately zero. We have been working hard on renewable energy since the 1970s. The low hanging fruit has been picked.
My favorite renewable energy quote:
CommieBob- Exactly right. Your thoughts explain not only why we don’t have the a 200 mile range on a battery car, but also why we don’t have a cure for cancer despite spending years and millions on the “War on Cancer.” Most cancer research is funded by the National Institutes of Health which relies on peer reviewed proposals. The proposals that get accepted are for doing what everyone else is doing. So no one gets funded that is doing something “Different”. Very astute and timely observation, applicable to almost everything discussed at WUWT!
Yes, I agree with you Bob and O.E.
I suppose I should have included the /sarc tag on that one.
It is intuitively obvious to me that Kerry’s appeal is pretty much 100% guaranteed to be a waste of his breathe and our time.
old engineer – April 8, 2016 at 8:29 am
We have more than a few hints from petri dishes and animal studies that cannabis may be a cure for some (all?) cancers. So why aren’t they working that day and night? Big Pharma is a BIG contributor to “Drug Free America” and other such outfits. Without cannabis being rescheduled it is really hard to get proper research done.
All we have to go by is the petri dishes, animals, and copious anecdotes. Interesting but hardly definitive.
M Simon,
If this were true, it should take some very simple epidemiological studies to confirm.
There is no dearth of lifelong pot smokers in the world, or in the US, or in any particular place…and no shortage of cancer cases.
In fact given the large numbers of each of there things, it should be plainly obvious just by a cursory examination of cancer rates in various populations.
What is the supposed biochemical or immunologic basis of this belief?
I have a few hints from movies I have seen that sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie, and yet people in filth ridden cities go hungry.
I was once asked to attend a presentation of a new technology to see if we should invest in it. Most of those present were salesmen, but the technology discussion came from the only technical person The invention involved improving a fuel by mixing it with water in a rather exotic way. The resulting fuel was to have a higher heating value than the original, unimproved fuel, violating the laws of physics. (Mind you, this was not improving combustion, the heat values used were all 100% combusted.) I asked a few questions and then finally asked where the extra energy came from. He said, “cold fusion.” I threw down my pen in disgust.
Menicholas. Smoking pot or inhaling any hot combustion by-product for that matter is a very bad idea. The field of CBD extract (oil) has very promising results given the limited testing. Some foreign countries like Spain have done some good research on humans. It is NOT “smoking pot” (THC).
A group of tribespeople come to the edge of the jungle and see two large cities on the horizon. One says that he’s heard it said that the people in one city can communicate with people in the other, with a kind of slim box they hold to their ear. Another retorts that his claim is pure bunk, after all a drum large enough for its sound to be heard at that distance would be so large that it would be beyond the combined strength of an entire tribe to beat the thing.
Moral: The fact that something is impossible within the framework of our current technology does not mean that it is ultimately impossible. Today we know the theory, we know that there are more than four elements, but it would be sheer hubris to assume that our puny little theory describes the entirely of the universe, and does so infallibly.
Arthur Clarke’s third law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I had adopted a “wait and see” attitude about Rossi and his “invention”.
Some of the reported results, like the so-called “Lugano Report” (http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf) seemed pretty positive, and the researchers involved checked out for credentials and general credibility. Even so, the report had some markedly strange shortcomings that do not seem in character with the personages involved.
There were critiques of the report but nothing really damning. Still there was nothing really to rule out sleight-of-hand either.
And of course those were not fully independent tests. And I was not really aware of Rossi’s extensive history of subterfuge, which does put things in a more negative light.
There were also reports that the U.S. Navy and others had been experimenting with LENR involving nickel for some time. Which seemed to lend the idea some modicum of plausibility. I did not, however, give any credence to Rossi’s attempted “explanations” of how it was supposed to work, which struck me as just so much hand-waving.
Regardless: I believe in observable, empirical evidence and there seems little doubt it is lacking all around in this case, on both sides of the issue.
Obviously the burden is on Rossi to demonstrate that it works.
I do not consider lawsuits to be scientific evidence of anything at all. On the other hand, it would seem that in light of the lawsuit, if it did indeed work Rossi would be foolish not to prove it, publicly, once and for all.
While I certainly agree it doesn’t look good for Rossi, I’ll maintain a wait-and-see attitude. In my view, the only thing that even resembles real evidence to date, in ANY direction, is the Lugano Report, even though it was far from perfect and even very smart people can be fooled.
What were the observable, empirical evidences that IH saw lacking in Rossi’s ‘invention?’
I haven’t seen anything that would count, just vague legal claims. It’s all very strange, Darden seemed like a decent, though idealistic, fellow and spoke at a LENR conference last year. I wouldn’t have expected things to take a turn like this.
One thing I’m gathering is that the review of the year-long test was done by someone with close ties to Rossi and may have no details beyond energy in and heat out. After criticism of previous tests, I’m amazed that people didn’t go out of their way to get a decent team of truly independent people to do the analysis.
Doesn’t the fact that IH built the device used in the Elforsk experiment say anything to you?
The fact remains that evidence is lacking, all around. The closest thing we have to real evidence of anything is that report from Elforsk. All else is guesswork.
Rossi appears to have a well-earned bad reputation. That is not per se evidence of anything (although of course it tends to color opinion).
Lawsuits aren’t evidence. Evidence is what makes or breaks lawsuits. We’ll see.
The Lugano Report should have used a battery as its source of electricity, not a wall-outlet. That would have been more secure against fakery.
Rossi has definitely gone “all in” on this one. If he loses, then he will have to give back what remains of the IH money, including his Miami beach condos. He also risks losing his freedom and going back to the slammer for many years if he is indicted for fraud and convicted. Personally, I am rooting for IH and the authorities, basically because 8 years of bs without a single commercially viable device is just ludicrous. Lastly, his law firm (silverlaw.com) is less impressive than the Three Stooges.
One complicating detail is that any claim that Rossi’s device doesn’t work needs to take into consideration (or completely ignore) a recent claim that the E-Cat has been reproduced in a much more open setting. https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/ says:
The home page for the MFMP is http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
This field is getting to have more players and more odd connections than climate science has….
makes it virtually impossible to say that Rossi does not have what he claims.
The doublespeak, it burns.
Rossi does not have what he claims.
See, only virtually impossible.
LOL.
You win the internet today!
Virtual means ‘not real’ doesn’t it.
A ‘virtual’ image doesn’t exist anywhere; no EM radiation passes through a ‘virtual’ image, It just looks like it is there, but it isn’t; you can’t project a virtual image on a screen.
G
For George:
Don’t get into the presumption that virtual images have no consequence. They are the things you see in mirrors. If I used a Cassegrainian reflective optic to image the output of a high-energy laser at you, you would see a virtual image of the laser source…at least for a few tenths of a second before you were snuffed out!
As for Rossi, right or wrong, he raises the implication that if we could control the rates of radioactive decay, the energy available through weak force reactions could ultimately be as plentiful as from fission. I’ve calculated the total energy available from completion of various isotope decay paths, and it arrives at a specific energy very comparable to uranium fission. It is worth contemplation.
Ric Werme, the quote: makes it virtually impossible to say that Rossi does not have what he claims
If the E-cat worked as claimed, Rossi could use his $11 million to buy a small yacht, install a “working” E-cat in it, and go around the world without refueling. He could have mounted one in a tractor-trailer and driven it back and forth across the country without refueling. Everything else except a working E-cat is available off the shelf for such demonstrations. He could have installed one (or a few) beside a Home Depot and supplied their electricity with no grid connection. He could have installed one beside any auto repair facility.
Sometimes the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. This is one of those times.
This isn’t that hard to figure out.
Exactly how does one turn a device that makes low pressure steam or one that gets hotter but hasn’t been designed for boiling water and used it to go around the world without refueling?
Besides the issue of bring along enough food, the E-Cat is unable to tame storms. Besides, Rossi isn’t interested in doing that. Why do you want him to do that? To get him out of the country and maybe lost at sea?
Ric Werme: Exactly how does one turn a device that makes low pressure steam or one that gets hotter but hasn’t been designed for boiling water and used it to go around the world without refueling?
rossi claimed at least 4 years ago that the E-cat put out excess power. Not quite like Lycoming’s original steam engine or the steam engine Dewitt Clinton put on a paddle boat, but in that league. The figure of 1.4kW is cited below. If I had a device that reliably produced 1.4kW of power, I’d buy a bunch of stuff at Home Depot, using my $11M, and attach the sucker to something that wanted that much power. But you are right: a Stirling engine powered by low pressure steam would work better on the “slow tractor trailer” than on an ocean going vessel. I apologize for the exaggeration.
1.4kW would power a bright multicolored LED light in Las Vegas. You could see it for miles and miles and miles. A series of them could power the emergency call boxes that are place along the highways between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It could power the air conditioning in one of the little diners in Baker.
Have you been to any high school science fairs? Give an award to the best use of a reliable, low cost, 1.4kW power source, and see how many designs you can come up with. With LEDs, it could light the whole auditorium. Did I mention powering the White House Christmas tree? Pumping the water for the strawberries in Ventura County CA.
It’s a shame HI lost an $11M investment, but you can see how much money can be made by selling a reliable stationary 1.4kW power source as described by Rossi in his promotional literature.
oops, it was Robert Fulton who put a steam engine in a paddle boat, not Dewitt Clinton.
there is plenty of evidence that LENR is a real effect. however, two identical experimental setups fail to produce identical results. like rolling the dice, it works when the dice turn up 7. the rest of the time, nothing. and no one knows why. so one group says it works, only to be unable to recreate their own findings the next time around.
sort of like dating women. same experimental setup, different results. no one know why.
We know why. There’s not a technology to create fusion because the energy constraints are too demanding.
Only amateurs and grant whores believe cold fusion is possible. I’m neither so I can tell the truth. Nuclear fusion, fission, etc – aren’t very complicated. They’re simply very very energetic.
Cold fusion isn’t going to be coming around next year, or in the next ten years, because people can’t do, what they’re all the time claiming they’re just about to do.
Failure to understand the equipment or operating design
How so? There were problems replicating the P&F results, but no one really knew what was going on at the time. There was another company that produced one batch of their fuel that worked well, but last I heard they had never been able to do that again.
A fellow I knew, Les Case, had a device that was quite replicable until he tried to scale it up.
The Rossi device was unique in that it was replicable and produced so much power that the exceedingly careful calorimetry P&F had to do wasn’t necessary.
Ric Werme: The Rossi device was unique in that it was replicable and produced so much power that the exceedingly careful calorimetry P&F had to do wasn’t necessary.
Yet here we are years later, and not a single installed working device. Just one or a few would be sufficient to light the MIT swimming facility, or the Caltech gyms. One or a few could power the computer lab of a small college like Harvey Mudd, or illuminate the tower at the Pomona College quad.
These fusion threads always take me back.
Sherman, set the WABAC machine to the 1970s.
There I was, a newly minted first year, first semester chemistry grad student. First course up, Inorganic Chemistry, taught by an outstanding prof. Part one was a grand slam tour of the Periodic Table. When we got to the Platinum group metals, things got real interesting. Pt and Pd are well known to soak up H2 like a sponge. They can soak up so much that the metal will actually deform. Now Pt and PD are not soft metals at all. They are hard and strong. Yet a 1 cm cube will take up so much hydrogen that it swells and the sides bulge out. The internal forces must be incredible.
Pt and Pd have been used as a catalyst for hydrogenation reactions since forever, and were well known even to undergrads. But this is different. We were cautioned to approach Pt, Pd/H2 systems with extreme caution. There is something very, very strange going on with this system. Nobody knows what is going on, nobody has even the start of a theory, nothing is reproducible. But something is going on, and it is weird. And there are reports from all over the place, going back years. So whatever it is, it is real enough. Here there be Dragons.
So we looked at fusion. How can a metal lattice force two H atoms so close, that they fuse? You would have to overcome the coulombic repulsion of the electron clouds to allow the two nuclei to approach to fusion distance. (Not to mention the repulsion between to two protons.) Nobody could think of how a metal lattice could do all that.
And this was all the way back in the mid 1970s.
Much later, we got Pons and Fleischmann with their electrochemical cell, with all the strangeness we had come to expect from a Pd/H2 system. Now we know that cold fusion is possible. The Farnsworth Fusor does that, and is used medically. So in a sense, what Pons and Fleischmann were doing, conceptually, was making a solid phase version of the gas phase Farnsworth Fusor. With luck, it might even exceed energy breakeven. But alas, it was not to be. Pons and Fleischmann got tangled up with the weirdness and Dragons that inhabit this corner of the Periodic Table.
In short, we still do not have the first clue what is going on with this system.
@TonyL April 7, 2016 at 11:15 pm, that being the case perhaps the new starting point should be Pt or Pd coated nano tubes made out of graphene?
The active surface area would be huge per unit area, plus graphene properties to boot!
@Steve Richards
I have no idea.
Current speculation is that the crystal structure arrangement of the metal atoms is what is doing the heavy lifting. Further, some thought is that when you start with fresh, pure materials, things are not quite right and do not work. After the Pd has been kicked around for a while, you get distortions and dislocations in the lattice. Some of the newly formed high energy sites have the “Goldilocks” property and that is where all the action happens. It is also thought that metallic impurities in the Pd may play a role for the exact same reason. All this is pretty mainstream for chemical catalysis stuff. Here, at least this speculation “explains” why the system does not work, and then it does.
Graphene nanotubes?
As far as I remember, thin metal films on a hetero matrix tend to be more amorphous and less crystalline. So there quite a bit different. Your chemistry is all about surface adsorbed molecules. Catalysts of Pt or Pd on a high surface area matrix are all about hydrogenation reactions and there has been a lot of work done.
So what this system would do, I could not possibly tell you.
“So whatever it is, it is real enough. Here there be Dragons.”
Funny. Really funny, considering that there never were any dragons, here, there, or anywhere else in between.
I believe this is true based on no evidence just like I believe CO2 is frying the planet based on no evidence.
Which is to say, not at all.
But I have no doubt that CO2 is really frying the planet in some people’s minds.
But that does not make it real.
When I want dragons, I switch on Game of Thrones.
The Farnswortrh Fusor is not a cold fusion device. You should have studied some physics. BTW Polywell Fusion is a magnetic version of the Farnsworth device. No one is willing to fund it. The Farnsworth device is not a net energy generator. Polywell might be.
If you want to fund Polywell – contact me – I’m not difficult to find and have extensive connections in the field.
SR1984, nanotubes are rolled up graphenes. Or, graphenes are unrolled nanotubes.
To roll, or not to roll, that is the question.
Btw, if you read up on the three chiralities of single wall carbon nanotubes you will also learn they can roll up in 3 ways, only one of whichmis ‘metallic’ conducting. Really.
This is why we should not be dismissive of cold fusion or LENR. This weird stuff has been observed going back to the 1920’s. There is something going on there and it is unknown physics.
Rarely are experimental setups identical. Outside of my freshman chemistry class I was rarely called upon to catalog the apparatus in any experimental setting upwards of sophomore year. When was the last time you read any paper that detailed the actual physical devices and went over the experimental procedure in sufficient detail that anyone with a decent high school education could follow the directions and get the same results? I’m going to guess “never”, and that’s just an estimate. And if you queried the “investigators” it’s likely they don’t have a clue either. It’s TA’s, post-docs, and work-study students that do all the heavy lifting.
I browsed the links Ric Werme posted above.
Seems Industrial Heat is a penny-ante operation as well. A couple of companies, a holding company all sharing the same phone number. A company which exists as nothing more than a filing of incorporation in the state of Delaware. A classic example of the legal Curly Shuffle, generally used to evade responsibility in the event of fully foreseen legal/criminal problems.
I am *not* impressed.
On the other hand:
If what Rossi says is even remotely true, He must have gained valuable experience advancing the dependability and reliability of the E-Cat. He should be able to demonstrate a working E-Cat to one and all, in a totally convincing fashion, a power production run lasting hours or days, not months or years. Turn it on, it works. Simple, easy to understand. Then he gets to name his own price, and to the industry majors. No more penny-ante operators.
I am still *not* impressed.
I was rather disappointed when Rossi’s partner turned out to be more of a holding company than an outfit that could crank out millions of devices for countries that don’t get bent out of shape over nuclear energy.
I’m sure companies like General Electric and Siemens are putting a lot more resources into LENR projects than IH could, even if their results are negative so far. They’re also a lot better than IH and Rossi at keeping their mouths closed.
“Startup” might (or might not) be a better description of Industrial Heat. One of my businesses, for convenience the registered office was the accountant’s address, on advice from the accountant. That way all the boring tax correspondence went straight to the person I paid to deal with it.
Rossi’s “ECAT” is the nuclear industry equivalent of the “KiteGen” in the realm of renewables. The only energy produced by these scammers is the hot air of their press releases.
By the end of 2016 .
Mr Worrell.
I look forward to reading your abject personal apology.
Will it be posted here?
If I am wrong about Rossi’s E-Cat, I will send Rossi a letter with my apology, and with Anthony’s permission post a copy here. Having said, I shall need to see some pretty compelling evidence, to convince me of what I believe to be an extraordinary claim, about “weak nuclear force” reactions.
What sort of evidence would I accept?
If say at least a dozen major cities build their own gigawatt scale E-Cats, and report good ongoing results, I will take that as compelling evidence I that was wrong.
And that is exactly the sort of evidence I believe we should see, if Rossi has what he claims he has – he should be in a position to mount demonstration after demonstration – e-cat powered “round the world” flights, which keep flying for months without a stop, e-cat powered ships, e-cat powered cars, e-cat powered toys – there should be no stopping the flood of high quality evidence.
With respect, I think that’s just a bit over the top.
The idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is fine for investors, but not scientists.
It requires just as much evidence as any other claim. No more, no less.
I see no reason many Gigawatt installations would be necessary to prove the device works. A device that produced 100 Watts of excess energy over a sustained period — with adequate verification — would do just fine.
The Elforsk experiment claimed over a Megawatt-hour of excess over a period of 30 days.
The problem we’ve had, obviously, is verification. That experiment was not adequately overseen, it wasn’t open enough, and there were gaps in the methodology.
So of course that still leaves us without sufficient evidence to say it works. But the same sort of experiment, properly devised, conducted openly by competent researchers of good repute, and then replicated in the same manner, would be adequate evidence for me.
Rossi’s explanation for the lack of radiation is an extraordinary claim.
@ur momisugly Anne O
I am with you about over the top needs, and I ran the numbers. 1 Mwh over 30 days is 1.4 Kw sustained.
That is your Mr Fusion coffee maker right there. And that is your extraordinary proof.
Now I know the need to protect yourself. You do not need to tell people how it works, and you do not need to let people look in the reaction chamber, and you do not need to tell people how you built it.
What you do need to do is produce more power than can be generated by any chemical process for something of that size and weight.
The principles have an extraordinary device which does extraordinary things.
The principles choose not to demonstrate it where people can actually get a look at it. This is the only extraordinary thing about this whole affair.
The principles have an extraordinary device. Or Not.
All you have written and more I look forward too.
Though a device that would give me 100watts 24/7-365.
With COP of 50.
Would serve as proof for me.
Tony L: I am with you about over the top needs, and I ran the numbers. 1 Mwh over 30 days is 1.4 Kw sustained.
That is your Mr Fusion coffee maker right there. And that is your extraordinary proof.
The tractor-trailer and yacht I referred to would be moving kind of slow, but that would be more than has been shown so far. In the years that I have been reading about Rossi, he hasn’t powered so much as a Christmas tree or television. Everything that exists on Earth that could benefit from 1.4 Kw sustained power he has avoided.
How about the US federal government investing several billion dollars of taxpayer money in a company to develop the E-Cat — perhaps with Al Gore as CEO? That would make it legit, right? Stay tuned …
I am glad you at least covered this story. It is certainly strange that Woodward and IH stated they did due diligence in advancing money to Rossi. And they made such decisions ONLY AFTER having tested the ecat to their satisfaction.
I mean if tomorrow some company announces that global warming is real, then you post here and accept that as face value? That is quite much what you doing with this press release from IH.
I should also point out that the ERV gave monthly reports – that means:
Rossi tracked the power output on a daily basis
The Chemical Company tracked the power output for their purposes. It is quite hard to steal 1 million watts of power on a daily basis without them knowing – the ecat was inside the chemical plant.
The ERV tracked the power output.
So 3 parties tracked power inputs and outputs. And IH/Darden received a monthly report from the ERV.
For IH state they don’t have any validation of power and LENR is outright silly. They had reports for 12 months in a row.
I suppose it possible that the chemical company, and Rossi and the ERV all are in this scam, but that’s really stretching things. I mean, hiding 1 million watts of power consuming is not at all that easy.
And you have to ask why IH was taking out patients then?
As noted, many LENR replications have occurred since 1989 and P & F days. And most of the reasons as to why replications are difficult are known today (insufficient loading of H into the metal is #1 reason for past failures).
SRI has tested LENR devices from Beryllium and again they work – and run without radiation. So now SRI is fooling us too?
In a really great way, the science community selling us out on global warming is quite much the same for LENR. And if LENR is real, then the global warming movement is DEAD in the water.
I will however state that Rossi should provide a demo unit to some independent news organization. It really is that simple, and this remains a sticking point. However, just like the wright brothers, they often heisted to show their airplane to prospective buyers due to Wrights being over worried that such people were only interested to steal and copy their designs.
The story of the ecat is not yet dead. But Rossi simply has to deliver working units to end this controversy.
Regards,
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
…people are actually defending Rossi?
In a world smitten with climate obsession, anything is possible.
Mr Rossi actually has enough money to set up his own energy production facility – and the energy going into, and out of, the building could be measured. The fact that he chooses NOT to do so, Twobob, speaks volumes.
Rossi has very little money, that’s one thing that forced him into partnering with IH in the first place.
Before that (he says) he mortgaged his home to continue development, before that he made a 1 MW hot water system and sold that to a mystery purchaser who turned out to be the US military. It’s unclear if it was ever delivered, I suspect it was a bit of a deal to legitimize the Navy into giving him some of their research funds without having to get approval from some oversight committee.
I beg to differ. He has been paid $11 million by Industrial Heat alone, never mind what the US military has also paid him. He is a VERY rich man. $11 million will buy you an adequate energy production building in which to showcase a provable unit.
$11 million is not enough to start a new industry like this or build factory to produce a million units per year (a woefully small number for something that is supposed to change the world).
However, I take back my comment about his finances. In http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/04/08/rossi-says-brake-now-removed-production-will-be-accelerated/ there is this exchange:
April 8, 2016 at 6:24 AM
Dr Rossi, questions on ECW:
1) Is this legal case going to affect the production of E-Cat X or Quarks or whatever they are called?
AR: NO
2) Is the production and appearance on market delayed? By how much?
AR: it will be accelerated, because they were a brake
3) Does Rossi need new investors and money to get the production started?
AR: no
4) What obstacles other than remaining R&D are there now to get production and sales started?
AR: none, apart, limited to the domestic E-Cats, the safety certification
Ric Werme: $11 million is not enough to start a new industry like this or build factory to produce a million units per year
That would enough to start and earn a substantial profit, if the E-cat worked as promoted. Apple didn’t start by producing a million units per year, nor did Adidas. If he could make one per month he’d have more impact than what he has now.
I am glad to read that he has no impediments to manufacture, and that he is planning to ramp up production. How many has he built so far, 2? 4? I lost count. What became of that venture with the Greek electric company?
Rossi sued first for lack of payment and for IH seeking patents on e-Cat tech in various countries and via other companies IH made. Now IH has a counter suit. Neither one is proof of anything.
There was an independent evaluation of the one year test done by a PhD physics accepted to both parties (per their contract that is now published). We will know how the test went when the report is published and / or the customer is identified and talks, not before.
From what I’ve seen, it could simply be IH trying to void the Rossi contract, patent something closely based on his work, and save a $ billion of royalty payments. I’ve seen no evidence either side is pure and morally pristine.
So IMHO, we are still where we were before. NO clear evidence either way per the e-Cat, waiting for independant proof.
FWIW, I strongly doubt Darden would hand over the $10, 000, 000 after the initial $1, 500, 000 without the e-Cat having passed a basic “makes obvious heat” sniff test. The contract specifies how much excess is the target (over 6 with a reduced payment if nbetween 4 and 6 COP) so IH saying it didn’t work can just be a claim of under 6. But that is speculation.
The US Navy, via NAVSEA, claims to have made LENR work and has patents. Them I trust to have proven the tech works, though performance data is lacking.
“Cold Fusion” is just that: stone cold.
Darn filter is annoying, the word Bogus got me in there?
There is an old Yorkshire saying: ” You can’t get owt from nowt.” I am sure Einstein would have agreed.
You can’t get owt FER nowt . When where you last in Yorkshire? 😉
You can’t get out for now! No, I’ve never been
If IH have, as Rossi claims, appropriated his technology and passed it on to others, then perhaps it serves him right for claiming to have a world-saving technology but refusing to share with anyone, or cooperate with any bodies that could provide an acceptable report on whether it’s real.
On the other hand, if Rossi is a scam artist, then so are IH as they’ve conned other investors with ‘demos’ of the reactors.
This is an interesting read on the whole situtaion:
http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/lenr-energy-blackswan-revolution-is-a-fact-ecat-at-cop-50-for-350-days/
That’s very interesting, it has information, claims and analysis that I am not at all familiar with. Thanks.
Phil: This is an interesting read on the whole situtaion:
Thank you for the link.
Phil, according to this link, a 1MW Ecat fits inside a standard shipping container. It looks from the diagram as though 2 1MW units could be put into a single shipping container.
http://ecat.com/ecat-products/ecat-1-mw
If that is correct, it could power a yacht or a tractor-trailer. If Rossi ramps up production, we ought soon to be seeing them all over the place.
Phil, from the link: Fabio Penon was the ERV responsible for certifying the IH Validations test in April 30th to May 3rd 2013. These tests consisted of two 24 hr tests with 30 E-Cats (1MW) and a 15 hr Hot-Cat test. All tests were obviously successfull achieving COP>6 since $10M was paid to Rossi. At the time of payment all E-Cat IP was delivered to IH.
…
The only sensible conclusion is that Darden only intended to get the plant for “personal” research and reverse engineering, and did not intend to test it according to the license agreement.
So, was “all E-Cat IP” delivered to IH or not?
Did anyone really believe this …even for a few moments?
Apparently so.
Color me skeptical in the extreme, and shocked at some of the credulity expressed above.
Turn on a TV camera, turn on the machine, make some water boil, or some other way of clearly demonstrate energy being produced.
“I can make rocks burn, but only in my garage while no one is looking” does not hold much water, IMO.
Sometimes works, and sometimes does not?
Funny how the times it does not work are all the times anyone is watching, and the cameras are running.
“Here be dragons?”
Bullshit…here be malarkey.
Until someone proves it aint.
I have seen zero proof. An article is not proof.
True. E.M. Smith has some good articles however…
“The US Navy, via NAVSEA, claims to have made LENR work and has patents. Them I trust to have proven the tech works, though performance data is lacking.”
See. https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/lanr-laves-metals-fusion/
and here https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/lenr-lanr-cold-fusion-you-can-trust/
Menicholas, you are going on a rip.
“Here be dragons?”
Standard grad student warning for any chemical system that was not well understood or just too damn hard to work with.
“TonyL – Whatever you do and wherever life takes you, remember. Stay Away From Colloid Chemistry. Colloids will never behave, they will make you mad” – a colloid chemist
“Bullshit…here be malarkey.”
Maybe. If anybody made any claim about anything.
The truth is nobody made any claim about anything back then. Just an observation that some people had seen weird things. Nobody was claiming fusion, nobody was claiming chemistry, nobody was claiming anything else.
Nothing to say Bullshit to.
Relax.
You seem a bit stressed, perhaps you need a vacation?
BTW, Rossi unfortunately has a poor character reputation, likely deserved, yet there are several others of better character reference and reputation, including MIT, operating in the field.
Here be Petrol Dragons…
Yeah Tony, that’s it. I am stressed and need a vacation.
Because your colorful observations as a first year grad student must not be contradicted, and your supposed status as a chemist by training makes whatever you say true, right?
“And there are reports from all over the place, going back years. So whatever it is, it is real enough.”
If this is your standard for determining what is and is not real, you are way to credulous.
Being trained in the sciences and thinking like a scientist are two different things.
BTW, as of today I am on vacation!
https://youtu.be/opk4x7jzRS4?t=3s
David A, thank you for the links to chiefio.
I am rooting for the teams, but to date what they have published is indistinguishable from random variation.
I’m sorry. If no-one knows how and why it works then it is just crap. Nuclear, fossil fuel, wind, PV, everyone knows how it works to the 6th decimal place. His crap is just a pig in a poke at the moment.
Like my wife’s grandmother told her after she drew something for her ‘come back when you have coloured it in , dear’.
We didn’t elucidate how aspirin worked until prostaglandins were discovered so people could discover aspirin binds to them. That was in the 1970s, so apparently people used that crap for a century or more before then.
There was actually a running joke in the 1990s that if aspirin (essentially a willow bark extract) had been discovered recently, it would never have gotten FDA approval, because we still didn’t know the details of how it worked.
Probably not true, Tall Dave. Most drugs work by mechanisms that are not very well understood.
Take every single SSRI, or any other psyche drugs, as examples.
It is known that SSRIs inhibit reabsorption of serotonin into the synaptic vesicles, but how this alleviates depression, or how and why this stimulates new synaptic connections between neurons, is very much a mystery. As is why they work for some people but not others.
For nearly any drug one can name, there are some mechanisms known but incomplete understanding of how the these mechanisms give the desired results, and why they do not in the cases where they do not work. And almost no drugs work for everyone who takes them.
I’m also sorry, but you are wrong. An observation does not need an explanation of WHY it is so to be an accurate observation. Mendel’s observations on genetics were true for many decades by our understanding of DNA allowed us to explain why they were true. For many years, master chefs made soufflés in copper bowls, because they said they rose better. Chemists of said it was nonsense, there is no way the composition of the bowl would matter – until a complex catalytic reaction between the copper and the egg albumin was discovered. A well observed fact does not need you or anyone to understand to be a fact. That’s how science works, find an observation that doesn’t have an explanation, devise an explanation (hypothesis) and then test it. But the observation is real, even if we don’t have a working hypothesis. So is there observable excess heat? If so then something is going on, and needs to be explored so we can understand it and use it. If not, then, “nothing going on here folks, move along”. I suspect the latter, but don’t have enough information for a good informed opinion.
I was going to say something similar.
While I do know why the sky appears to be blue, I don’t need to know that in order to observe that it is blue.
The Curies did not need to know how rocks clouded their film, in order to observe that indeed they did. In their case a theory was forthcoming presently but that has not always been the case.
I am amused by people who make claims to the tune of “it cannot be true because I do not understand it.”
You all know what I meant but decided to be obtuse about it by referring to medicine and the Curies.
So it’s a willful blindness, is it Alex?
Now as for me, I’ll doubt Rossi because he doesn’t seem to be trying to hard to actually prove he has what he claims. Not because what he claims seems unlikely. And I don’t expect him to ‘Fly around the world’ with what from all the reports sounds like a self heating water heater. All I expect from him is to produces more hot water then then you’d normally get from a wall outlet.
That shouldn’t be that hard to prove. ^¿^
OT
Amazing story of entrenched scientific orthodoxy. Could be rewritten almost line for line about climatology:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
Ever look into how and why people came to believe salt causes or exacerbates high blood pressure?
There was never any studies done at the outset of this myth…it was all propagated by one person asserting it, and gradually everyone else came to accept it as “common knowledge”.
And even after exhaustive epidemiological studies proved beyond all doubt that salt does not cause HBP in 99% of people, several medical associations acknowledged this fact, but then promptly reiterated their position that everyone should avoid salt. In fact the studies showed an association between low salt diets and higher than normal blood pressure.
Once an idea becomes lodged in peoples pigheaded heads, it is difficult to dislodge.
Right mission, wrong players. Squabbling in any field or endeavor is exhausting and diversionary. The next effort should be designed upfront for accountability, transparency, and replicability…then proceed.