Test of Rossi's 1 MW E-Cat fusion system apparently successful

I suspect that most readers of this blog are skeptical of the test and the “nearly free energy”, and rightly so. The comments make that pretty clear, in spite of the efforts of a few drop-in trolls trying to score points. At the same time, I think most of us are willing to be convinced by clear enough, extensive enough testing (which this last test clearly wasn’t), to give it a tiny fraction of a percent chance of being a break-through. Why not? I’m not going to invest money in it. Hopefully my government isn’t stupid enough to invest in it. So why not keep half an eye on it and quietly hope against all odds that it isn’t a scam or a mistake?
No downside, and if the million or more to one shot comes home we get to watch Mann and all of the others who are living off the Global Warming meme become irrelevant. Fine. We won’t burn any more coal because something else is cheaper. End of discussion. End of IPCC. End of Carbon Trading schemes. End of grants to prove global warming, with their accompanying distortions of science. End of gravy train.
That’s all fun to imagine, though most of us know that the chances of it actually happening are extremely low.

Erik Ramberg says:
October 29, 2011 at 8:06 am

…
You are certainly free to include whatever you want in this blog. But it ain’t science, that’s for sure.

And I’m just as certain you’re clueless as to what LENR stands for and what happens when it works. So your conclusion that “it ain’t science” is a bogus one. Just as the flat-earther’s looked at the horizon, couldn’t see any curvature, and proclaimed the earth to be flat.

For the other skeptics like me who picked him as a scammer:
“Twenty years ago he was arrested for illegal importing of gold from the Swiss.
“In the 1980s he was involved in a scam with industrial waste. It is a complex thing to explain, but the scam cost the Lombardy region € 25 million.

Reactions of an observer not versed in the science:
1. If it’s a scam it’s both elaborate and foolish, for it’s hard to see how Rossi cashes out, especially if he’s in hock up to his ears already. If it doesn’t work, he’s broke, washed up, and will have lost all credibility. How does he make any money off of something that doesn’t work, unless he’s going for government funding, a la the Solyndra bunch? Yet there’s no indication that he’s doing so, that I can see so far.
Conclusion: Either Rossi, himself, must think it works, or Rossi is a complete crackpot who doesn’t care about his future, only about getting all the attention possible for a brief stint in his life. In other words, if it’s a scam, it’s not a moneymaking scam, but an attention-getting scam, certainly possible if he’s a big enough flake.
But, if he thinks it works, then he would know that the generator isn’t providing the excess power, and he would know that he hadn’t just created an exothermic chemical reaction. (If he’s just after notoriety, of course, he also knows that the opposite is true.)
As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out.
2. Of course Anthony should cover this on his blog. If it’s a scam, we get another extended discussion on interpreting scams, and isn’t AGW one of the biggest scams of all time? [Aside: quoting Herman Cain on AGW: “It’s a scam.” Almost ensured my vote with that comment alone…]
As far as I’m concerned, one of the main topics of this site is scams…windmills, solar schemes, taxpayer holdups like cash for clunkers, AGW, the hockey stick, tree rings ignored, Climategate emails, heat islands ignored, polar bears disappearing, monitoring stations disappearing, sea level rising, etc.
And if it’s not a scam, great. Who could argue against the decision to discuss it here then?
3. It’s fascinating how the comments lead to further knowledge, or at least better information, in here. The MIT discussion alone made the whole thread worth reading, and makes me wonder whether it was Pons/Fleishmann perpetrating the fraud, or MIT? Given the power of government funding dollars, if I had to bet, my money would be placed on it being MIT.

Look folks, there’s certainly plenty of room for doubt about this e-cat device. It smells like a hoax from every direction.
Yet even though the phenomenon, if real, would be a new and/or unexplainable by current physics this is not in and of itself a valid reason for discounting it. It’s not a perpetual motion machine. No thermodynamic laws are being violated anymore than they are violated by a nuclear power plant. E=MC^2 explains where huge amounts of energy can seemingly come from nothing. It doesn’t actually come from nothing but rather comes from a miniscule amount of matter getting converted to energy. The trick is that most matter is very stable and doesn’t spontaneously turn into energy quickly enough to be useful except under huge extremes of temperature and pressure that are not easily generated or controlled.
Catalysts however are weird and often beyond our capacity to predict so we often find them the old fashioned way by trial and error sometimes with some clues to guide us and sometimes not. While catalysts usually denote something that speeds up chemical reactions there are plenty of weirdnesses at the subatomic level that defy explanations.
When I look at claims of LENR or cold fusion of course I’m skeptical but I also recall the skepticism over high temperature superconductors. To this day there is no theory in physics that explains high temperature superconductors and to this day we discover them mostly through serendipity guided only by playing around with the formulas for weird lattice structures that have known superconducting properties and hoping that we stumble upon something that works at a higher temperature than the antecedants. Occasionally some incrementally better structure is discovered.
Simply and truthfully put our theoretical models of reality break down at the edge of the envelope in the domains of the very small and the very large both in time and in dimension. Contrary to popular belief we don’t have all the answers and are not merely in the process of filling in the details with faster and faster computers to crunch the numbers.
But I don’t tend to put much faith in finding solutions via trial and error. A room temperature superconductor that is cheap and ductile might exist but in the engineering business you can’t predict how long it takes to get lucky when you’re just guessing or how long it takes to discover something that you have no knowledge of. This is why I pin my hopes on solving the long-term energy problem on a technology that is an engineering problem where there is no discovery needed but rather one that can definitely be solved with time and money. That technology is synthetic biology. Extant natural biology already proves that sunlight, water, and air can be turned into solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbon fuels. The problem is merely one of modification of those extant technologies to suit human purposes. Hydrocarbon fuels produced by naturally occuring organisms are not usually a desired end product of said organisms but rather a metabolic waste product where producing more than a small amount, at best, has no survival benefit for the organism so in the harsh world of natural selection and survival of the fittest these biological products WE desire are minimized in nature rather than maximized. Since our synthetic organisms won’t have to compete in the wild and survive on their own we can modify them to maximize production of products that we desire. It’s only a matter of time as we engineer faster and better systems for cutting, pasting, and genetic modifications and inventory all the extant functionality in nature. It’s pretty much just a matter of engineering better, faster, cheaper, automated biology lab equipment -. a problem defined by time and money not basic discovery. The rate of progress in genetic engineering is incredible and reminds me of what happened in the semi-conductor world during the 40 years of my involvment with that. Already the Venter Institute has been able to assemble a working minimal bacterial genome from mail-order DNA snippets. This was a huge milestone. I suggest paying attention to it.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465406a.html

Synthetic genome resets biotech goals
The assembly of a genome that can ‘reboot’ cells of a closely related species is one step in a much longer path.

Synthetic biology is the next big technological revolution and it’s going to make those that came before (even the biggies like metallurgy, agriculture, electricity & electronics) look trivial in comparison. We’re talking about being able to harness the energy of the sunlight that falls on the earth pretty for free and building anything we want out of naturally occuring materials pretty much for free. It all simply hinges on being able to customize and control self-reproducing micro-organisms. The range of capabilities and materials they already work with in nature is huge so it’s just a matter of modifying them with control programs like so many little self-reproducing microscopic factory workers that don’t need paychecks or pension programs.

Dr A Burns “Twenty years ago he was arrested for illegal importing of gold from the Swiss. In the 1980s he was involved in a scam with industrial waste. It is a complex thing to explain, but the scam cost the Lombardy region € 25 million.”
Correct. So it could be scam now. Or not. It’s also possible that these earlier accusations were false. Or true. He could be a Robin Hood. An innocent trying to help the planet. Or a showman and gambler. The book Secrets of the Soil tells many stories of suppression of inventions that would truly benefit the planet, because they got in the way of some big business. Heck I’m sure we all know such stories. Climate Science is full of them…
Questions, more questions, not naive acceptance nor naive rejection.

Rossi has been very picky about who he lets in; Enrico Billi, a nuclear physicist and friend of Rossi’s, who is presently living in China and helping to open doors there for this technology; Professor Christos Stremmenos, from the University of Bologna, who told me all about his theory of how the technology works; Pierre Clauzon, nuclear engineering professor from France, who told me about several theoretical physicists trying to understand cold fusion in general and the E-Cat in particular; Uzikova Irina, a nuclear plant designer from Russia; Stefan Heglesson, representing a Swedish interest in the technology; Loris Ferrari, Associate Professor of Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Bologna, who will be one of the five professors to do the two year test of the E-Cat, which hopefully will be funded as a result of today’s test. They will study both the “how” and the “why” of the technology.
You cannot just handwave a team like this away.

Luboš Motl says:
October 29, 2011 at 9:53 am

I forgot to reply to Anthony’s sentence
“If you don’t like it don’t read it. cheers, Anthony”
to a critic of cold fusion (nicknamed Carbon-based life) which I view as an extremely dangerous one. It implicitly says that Anthony only wants the cold fusion articles (and maybe others?) to be read by those who are eager to say that this pseudoscience makes any sense. But you can’t get a balanced and complete evaluation of scientific problems if you impose these pressures, Anthony.

I’ve not seen any of these so-called “pressures” you accuse Anthony of, Lubos. The pressure I bring to bear is for everybody to get up-to-speed on LENR before shooting their mouths off–that’s the embarrassing part, not the fact that LENR is an interesting subject making headway, or that Anthony gave Ric a chance to update eveybody on a few of the latest happenings (and I think Ric has been pretty even-handed about it, too).
Me? Like my “realist” attitude about CAGW, I’m a “realist” about CF/LENR. I just happen to be a grad of the U of U so naturally the P/F episode strikes close to home, but from my own research over a number of years and involvement in materials science I’m what you’d probably call a “realistic believer”. But, like Anthony or Ric, I’m not forcing my opinions on anybody, especially you–just eagerly revealing what I believe to be logical or infomational shortfalls. And you may call me a “mindless advocate” if you want, but it is you who appears to be disarmed with the facts.

For those certain that it is a scam – we don’t have enough information to draw that conclusion with any certainty.
For those that think there is strong evidence it works – we don’t have enough information to draw that conclusion with any certainty.
Much of my professional life was selling bleeding edge technology to bleeding edge R&D organizations, and I got to meet plenty of seriously smart people. Some of them were more or less normal (whatever that term really means when applied to the human condition) but a fair number of them were complete eccentrics…to put it mildly. Jerry Huff proudly showed me his method for building a touch sensitive switch back when no one had ever heard of such a thing being possible. I asked if he patented it. Nope, he said, but he wrote a letter to Popular Electronics explaining how it worked… John Carlson built an entirely hydraulic pump jack before programmable controllers came along that current technology still has trouble matching for functionality. He had a vision one night in which he insists his deity told him it was evil and that night he cut the prototype to pieces and destroyed the documentation.
I could go on, and on with examples but extreme intelligence frequently comes with eccentric behaviour. Couple that with someone who also has minimal business experience in comparison to their technical experience, and I don’t think you can point at that person’s irrational behaviour and poor business acumen to prove it is a scam.
Leaving the cables from a diesel gen set plugged in during the demo run? Well that certainly raises suspiscions, but on the other hand, anyone perpetrating a scam would probably go out of their way to hide those rather than waving their hands and saying “its ok, they’re shut off”.
As for his patent and the missing information, I learned something about patents a long time ago from having been involved in many research projects that wound up producing patented products or techniques. By filing for a patent, you are putting your intellectual property into the public domain where it is now governed by legal processes. As any IP lawyer will tell you:
“A patent is only as good as your ability to defend it”
If Rossi really has something (and I think he has SOMETHING of interest, just of what value I don’t know) he would do well to keep the “secret sauce” away from the public eye for as long as is practical…that being until he has sufficient financial backing to defend the patent.

I’m amazed at the mindless, hostile skepticism expressed by so many here. I read WUWT because Anthony concentrates on presenting the science behind AGW skepticism. It’s not just mindless negativity like so many of the comments on this article.
I have no reservations about calling AGW a scam, because I have looked at the science on both sides and determined that the scam is obvious.
But on this thread, people are calling e-Cat a scam seemingly without any attempt to investigate the underlying science. At least a minority here have mentioned the long history of successful replications of LENR reactions. That’s a start. There has been enough verification and replication of positive LENR results that for anyone to call this “perpetual motion” as one on this thread, is just willful ignorance.
I have also seen no reference at all here to the work of Frank Znidarsic, which gives a mathematical framework of how LENR reactions work.
There is no longer any question that LENR is a real phenomenon. It has been replicated too many times. And now with Frank Znidarsic’s work, there is a theoretical framework to explain it. The only question is whether Rossi has managed to develop it in a form that is consistent enough and powerful enough to be commercially viable.

But, I want to Believe…..
So the eCat scam continues.
To the commenter Jim, I’ll be happy take your action (any one else too)! I’ll put up $1,000.00 cash right now, do you have any way of showing me you have $1,000,000.00 in liquid assets to pay for your loss?
I have actually look at putting this up on Intrade and create a line of betting.
But first we have too agree on what constitutes the bet.
For eCat to be considered successful, a device has to be well/correctly/sufficiently instrumented to measure all relevant electrical/fluid/gasses input/output for a sufficient period of time to validate some process is generating X more power than it consumes.
I don’t care what the “process” is, cold fusion or angels dancing on the head of a pin, just as long as it is generating energy.
The testing will have to be preformed in some form of “public” test by myself, with other WUWT skeptics and/or a trusted 3rd party (Underwriters Lab, National Institute of Science and Technology, etc). I have sufficient Shop space, net access to provide real-time camera feeds. I’ll need to help in system setup, getting the sensors wired to computer for data collection and publishing the results. What do you say WUWT community?
What do you say Jim, ready to put your money where you mouth is?
But back to reality.
It is really quite simple, Rossi has not now or ever validated his claim(s). Why is this so hard for you all to understand?
Mr Watts (Anthony) in a reply to a commenter says “That’s what this blog does – we try out ideas.” Well this is long past being just trying out ideas. The January or even the August posting one could say here is an idea/invention take a look. The lengthy discussion in August well documented Rossi’s lack of sufficient data required to validate his claims. Continuing to give him a forum simple aides the scam and reduces the “trust” in the WUWT brand (but it is Your brand too do with as you choose).
As rpercifield points out in today’s comment and from his, mine and other’s comments in the lengthy August posting about eCat. Rossi has simply refused to correctly instrument his device to validate his claim of energy production. He does not need to build a megawatt unit or a gigawat unit, he does not have too sacrifice a single bit of his intellectual property. He simple needs to take one of his devices, correctly instrument it and he will have PROOF of his device’s function. His unwillingness to do so should be taken as a scam.
As commenter Mark points out, we all should just ignore Rossi until he does provide real evidence.
Finally to Mr. Watts and WUWT credability, from the thread of comments here and from August, even in this community of Skeptics there is a strong thread of “But I want to Believe…” This is exactly how we get Solyndra’s.
Some true believer behind government doors says, yes but even the naysayers over at WUWT believe this guy Rossi so lets give him the $500 Million he needs to demonstrate his machine. You may laugh at the idea but I have been in the Federal Government and seen this kind of nonsense happen.
Pete