Abd,
A few questions/comments:
1) Where did Dewey write this?
Here. At the beginning of my post is a link to his post. Normal lenr-forum practice.
Quote2) If IH had all of this information from Penon's draft reports, then why didn't they stop the test earlier?
I can speculate. So could you or anyone else who knows the history here. This question is a common type. It attempts to show a reductio ad absurdem, but there is, quite simply, nowhere enough information to do that. Logic does not necessarily apply to situations that are unique and relatively unprecedented, plus, remember .... insanity is already a possibility.
Quote3) If Penon's draft reports indicate fraud, then why is Jed calling Penon an idiot?
When Jed wrote that, my guess, and he may respond, he didn't know about the other reports. Penon did do something, it's in the public record, that was, ah, incompetent. Rossi seems to be a magnet for that. But if he did provide accurate reports, good on him. Jed is reactive and says what he thinks. He's also highly knowledgeable, both. He's worth paying attention to, if not necessarily believing everything he says, and particularly not necessarily his judgement of people. And I could give examples, and Jed could explode and we'd have a mess which would do nobody any good. Jed is a friend, worth getting to know.
Quote4) If Rossi is a fraud (and there is plenty of circumstantial evidence as well as tests to indicate that this is not the case) then I still don't
believe that he has hurt LENR research at all. In fact, I think that he has greatly increased the interest in LENR and especially for Ni-H LENR. I would even argue that IH would not have invested in LENR without Rossi. Similarly, Piantelli was "drawn out of retirement" to restart his research (with machines creating 100 W not 1 W) as a result of Rossi. So, the only harm, if Rossi is a fraud, is to IH and to the time of those who have following this. On the other hand, it has been entertaining!
Well, you can have your opinion. Is it based on experience, or is it just shooting off your mouth? What I wrote comes from reports from people who were actually working in the field.
Do you think that Piantelli's work is important? Have you looked at the possible artifacts? Has this been replicated? This is all NiH. Look at what Peter Gluck has been writing for a couple of years now. PdD is useless. NiH is "LENR+". Forget about messy old PdD. However, PdD is where the most solid experimental evidence exists. We actually know the reaction product from PdD, from widely confirmed experiment. We don't have anything like that from NiH. Yes, no doubt, Rossi "increased interest in LENR." But so did Pons and Fleischmann in 1989, and their announcement was premature and contained serious errors, and the effect of premature "interest" was replication failure and a massive depression of research for over two decades. The damage is different here. Almost everyone who remained active in the field moved to trying to replicate NiH heat. Mostly with failure. The experiments that the naive will often point to were .... the technical term is "horrible." Noobs, with no experience with calorimetry, making all the mistakes that one could make. Will they persist? Some will. I certainly hope for NiH LENR, it would be very convenient! But meanwhile, real research was dropped. It's starting up again, and part of that is realizing that Rossi isn't going to rescue the field.
Who said "fraud"? Did I? I've been watching the tests since 2011. I'm quite familiar with them, and know and regularly communicate with many others who are the same. I just read An Impossible Invention, and Mats is quite aware of the problem. Rossi has again and again done things to ensure that tests were not conclusive. There was always something. People who have not studied this deeply or who are heavily affected by belief (one way or the other) are running on hot air.
At the bottom line here, with the one-year test, the core of the agreement was that this was not only to prove that the reactor worked. It was to ensure that the technology had been transferred. The original test on which the $10 million license fee was transferred was by Rossi, in his facility, and Penon reported on that. IH accepted that report. But the one-year test was to be done by IH and fully under IH control (subject to the guidance of the ERV.) Sanely, Rossi would have kept his hands off, totally. Talk to them over the phone and by email, perhaps. This was to be a truly independent test, and that was fundamental to the agreement. Was it truly independent?
Again and again, Rossi insisted on conditions that torpedoed proposed collaborations and tests. Why? I can explain it, but the explanation essentially provides no information about whether or not Rossi actually has -- and still has -- a working technology. One theory I've heard is that, with his constant engineering changes, he actually lost the secret (which would mean that he never really understood his results, and this was quite common with cold fusion, it drove researchers crazy.)
What I see from people who think they understand what is going on, without having adequate information, relying on all these blog posts and claims and fluff, is an utter lack of imagination. How could all those tests be wrong?
Well, they could! And they could be real. And they could be anything in between, and my position from 2011 was that until there is truly independent confirmation, we cannot know. And that's standard science. Ross is not a scientist, can that be understood? That's not an insult, but Rossi has explicitly rejected the scientific method. Who needs controls? We already know what a control experiment will do. Nothing.
And that is a complete misunderstanding of what a control experiment is! the thinking reduces reality to black and white, yes and no, success and failure.
Rossi also has acknowledged being deceptive, i.e., releasing misleading information to divert competitors. People who want his work to be real and who think of him as the energy savior of the planet rationalize and justify this.
My hope at this point is that it all comes out, that the trial reveals what actually happened, in a context where empty claims go nowhere. If Rossi really has something, it's likely to come out. And I would be utterly unsurprised to see a fraud charge. After all, he's claimed fraud on the part of IH. But I have seen no evidence of fraud, just a huge pile of circumstantial appearances.