Jed Rothwell on an Unpublished E-Cat Test Report that “Looks Like it Worked”

Quote from Ascoli65

At collective level, our western societies have developed over the last 2-3 centuries a sort of fideism with respect to the limitless capability of our intellect.

Some days (or weeks) ago You, ascoli65 complained about your poor English-level.

I notice your improvment is stellar. It's already nearby abd.

Thus my conclusion: This entity ascoli65 is a new spam-bot of who ever... Or do you have an explanation, something like a 'white angel'?

Quote from Ascoli65

nearly unanimously denied by [hot fusion] mainstream science [with blatant conflicts of interest] a few months after its appearance

FTFY

@Ascoli65

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There should be some other deep and diverse reasons, so that the most incredible myth in the LENR history got so many exceptional supporters and was so widely reported in some major media.

Where do you see exceptional supporters? The academic world of Germany and UK has always been uninterested in cold fusion. The same in Italy, but for the University of Bologna where Prof. Focardi influenced his environment for at least two decades. After his death the silence in Bologna is total and very impressive.
Supporters have not been so exceptional if not even one cold fusionist could be admitted in EXFOR. Sure, Jed Rothwell is a supporter, but he is a man of letters.

Keieueue

They are poking you, don't rise to the bait. Leave out the ad homs its not worth it, many of us can see through this social engineered veil, no need to become part of it.

Best regards
Frank

Mary

Quote from Mary Yugo

What crappola and nonsense!

You seem to be an expert in this field I grant you that.

Best regards
Frank

@Mary Yugo,
In this Forum much has been written about calorimetry; nothing about gamma radiation detection. Focardi reaction - the one reported in Rossi's first patent patent application - delivers prompt gammas, easily detectable.
Takahashi writes:
... an example is the wish of 64 Ni + p to 65Cu(g.s.) + Q without prompt (lethal) gamma-rays from the intermediate excited state 65Cu(Ex)*. Such a primitive mistake should be avoided in any nuclear reaction theory.
Any nuclear reaction delivers promt gammas, doesn't it.

ascoli wrote:

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me:

First of all, the ellipsis you use above to replace part of the quote is dishonest.

This is the full quote:

me:

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The alternative that you hint at -- that Rothwell and all these scientists, technicians and academicians conspired together to lie to the public for some unspoken purpose -- is far far less plausible. In fact, it's not implausible at all that the Rossi sympathizers were either fooled or complicit in a simple fraud.

So you see, I did not suggest you were hinting at complicity in fraud. I said that complicity in fraud is *more* plausible than what you were hinting at, and therefore that you were *not* hinting at complicity in fraud. You changed (a portion of) the meaning of what I said to its opposite, so you could dispute it. Is that your usual mode of argument?

Ascoli:

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I didn't say that, and wouldn't hint at that: no conspiracy, no complicity, and no fraud.

As I said, I did not suggest you hinted at complicity in fraud. In fact, I said the opposite.

And, yes, you *do* hint at what I say you hint hint at. You say dozens of academicians and physicists are "convinced" by Rossi, but then you argue that they couldn't possibly be convinced by Rossi because they're too smart. So that means you are hinting that they are deliberately lying. And in many places in internet forums you have hinted that this is part of a

" 'machination'. By a government? I don’t know, maybe simply by some entity well introduced in its apparatus."

or an "operation". In fact, when I previously suggested you were inferring (hinting) that "the US military is conspiring to keep oil prices down, with Rossi as their main puppet, and professors at UniBo and Uppsala, and businessmen at Cherokee complicit", you agreed:

Ascoli: "I agree, this is one of the possible inferences, but it requires some adjustment, especially in the terminology. For example, I wouldn’t use the term “conspiracy”, I would prefer something like “operation”."

We know you don't like the word "conspiracy", but that's what it is. And anyway, I could use your words and call it a Machiavellian machination, and it would not make it any more plausible, and therefore would not weaken my point in any way.

So, of my statement, we've established the lying part, and the conspiring part. As for the unspoken purpose, well, yes, you pussyfoot around various purposes, but most recently you just said "deep and diverse reasons", so I called that unspoken. From what I recall, the reasons you've hinted at are keeping oil prices down, mollifying the public (even though other conspiracy theorists argue AGW is intended to alarm the public), and if I understand you, to vindicate Churchill's prediction. Not a whit of plausibility in any of it.

Ascoli wrote:

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Deep reasons, ... Even a phenomenon like CF/LENR, whose reality has been nearly unanimously denied by mainstream science a few months after its appearance, can find many individuals and private or public organizations ready to support it in a spontaneous way, each one with his specific motivations and purposes. That's what I meant with diverse reasons. They look as being coordinated, but they are just following a stream, as leaves on a river.

First, until now, these were unspoken.

Second, they are very different from your previous suggestions that the US military or some other entity was conducting an "operation", in which Rossi was a hired actor, compensated by funneling money through IH, and given immunity from prosecution. Here are some snippets from various posts to illustrate:

Ascoli:

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Suppose for a moment that one entity hired Rossi. What better complementary wage than giving him the opportunity to appear as the savior of the world. The same for the professors which cooperated with him, promising them the Nobel prize. To me it seems a more logical explanation, than supposing Rossi going around for finding people willing to praise him and his friends.... I am aware that many of his claims are not true, but to me he resembles more an actor playing his part....This figure, 12 M$, is special. It’s too high if the ecat does not work and it’s too low if the ecat works. But, minus the expenses, it is just the right reward for seven years working at a senior level.

Third, suggesting that the reasons are individual, involving vindication or the opportunity to get grant funding or some other compensation, is not different from what skeptics have argued all along, except skeptics allow the possibility that some of them actually believe that LENR or the ecat works. We do not consider professors infallible, as you seem to.

But now I'm wondering what your point is. The part I object to is your apparent suggestion that Rossi is acting at the behest of some (probably American military) organization, and that his endorsers are blatantly lying to help with his deception. If that's not what you're saying anymore, then maybe we are beginning to converge ... and it's not because my ideas have changed.

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This aphorism from Stan Szpak (1) describes the situation: "scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe." That's of course an exaggeration,

Just because someone says something doesn't make it true, especially if that someone is a member of a community you impugn for lying about LENR.

It's not just an exaggeration... it's nonsense. If it were true, no one would take anything said by scientists seriously. Why would people use scientists to endorse their claims if they simply believe what you pay them to believe. Could you pay a scientist to believe the earth is flat?

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but it's true that if you need 100 scientist to work on a certain project, and you have the funds, you will find them.

That's completely different. You can find scientists to work on a project with appropriate funding, but getting them to believe something contrary to the evidence is something else. Many scientists worked on SDI because it offered an opportunity to get funds to do interesting science, even if they were skeptical of Reagan's goals.

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me:

In an answer to a similar question on ecn (2), I counted 14 academicians,

That was in defense of a claim of a dozen who had supported the ecat in some way. Here you claimed dozens were convinced. Of those 14, as I said, only Levi and Focardi expressed certainty. You admitted that yourself in the exchange when you said: "None of these academicians did say that the “Ecat worked”, just declared that they saw a table top device producing many kW in excess with respect to the input power! All of them were also very puzzled about the underlying phenomenon, but some were optimistic that a new physics could have explained it."

So, they were *not* convinced.

And since then, the physics dept at UniBo has distanced itself from Rossi in a press release.

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You should add all the other physicists, or equivalent experts, who assisted at the tests held in the USA, including Melich, and those who declared to be anyway convinced of the reality of some unusual phenomena (excess heat or gamma bursts) generated by the Ecat, for instance Josephson, Celani, and some others at NASA and DoD units.

You've named 3, without citations indicating they were convinced. That's far short of dozens. (Not that there aren't dozens of sympathizers and dozens of convinced people -- just that credentialed endorsements claiming certainty are far scarcer.)

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You can also add those who declared to have replicated the Rossi effects, at least those who have some scientific degree.

In that case, if they were convinced, presumably their own experiments convinced them.

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And what to say about the people from NASA and other aerospace industries that imagined the future of air transport powered by the Ecat?

The NASA paper made it clear that it was a contingent plan, and as I remember, it cited LENR, but not the ecat. And it was some pretty low-level guy.

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me:

Of course. Nearly all the researchers will say that more researches are needed,

The point was they stopped short of saying they were convinced by those early demos.

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me:

We are talking about LENR device, and hence of the alleged excess heat with respect to any conventional and identifiable energy source. Of course.

Of course, but it means that simply acknowledging 12 kW does not indicate they are convinced LENR works.

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me:

The "some major media" include Popular Mechanics, printed in millions of copy in many English speaking countries, Science&Vie pour la francophonie, and many other magazines readable worldwide (Wired, Forbes, ecc). For the other countries, FWIK, there is NyTeknik in Sweden, and Focus and Panorama in Italy, but if you want a more complete picture you can regularly follow the AlainCo scoop site (3).

I have the complete picture, and none of that supports a claim of "widely reported in some major media". For that to be true, most people who follow world affairs would be familiar with it, but in fact very very few are. Outside some fringe corners, you would have trouble finding a person familiar with the story, even in physics departments. It's a tiny story. Even Energetics, which made it to 60-minutes is a more familiar story than Rossi.

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Finally, the most important contribution for the revival of the popular expectations about fusion energy came recently from TIME Magazine, which, in November 2015, dedicated the cover and a long article to the subject, citing also the Industrial Heat.

Wow! You are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Sure, Time is big time, but appearing in second order (IH) in a list in a story about all kinds of fusion, hardly justifies calling it widely reported.

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You exaggerate to support your whacky theory ....

Google doesn't provide me a translation of "whacky".

Check a dictionary or thesaurus. Preposterous, crazy, loony, that sort of thing.

And I'm not calling your latest idea whacky -- that scientists sometimes act selfishly. It is the idea that Rothwell and dozens of scientists blatantly lied to prop up the ecat at the behest of some organized entity such as the American military for Machiavellian machinations. If anyone other than you does not think that is whacky, I'm curious who.

Quote from IH Fanboy

Ascoli65 wrote:
nearly unanimously denied by [hot fusion] mainstream science [with blatant conflicts of interest] a few months after its appearance

FTFY

I partially agree with your FTFY. There is a huge "conflict of interest", but it is not the one between hot and cold fusion. This last is in blatant conflict of reality with Nature (not only the journal!), as the physicists, whatever they worked for, highlighted few months after the F&P press conference.

The real problem is that in our technological and highly complex society the "scientific truth" is in serious "conflict of interest" with the "research funding".

The Ecat affair could be considered as the emblem of this conflict. At January 2011, an unusually high number of academicians affirmed without any doubt that a table top device, indeed quite ugly, was been capable of multiplying by 12 an input power of 1 kW. At that time, their Department did already receive an economic proposal aimed to study that device. Few months later, the Council of Department, on behalf of all its hundred members, approved a biannual research program under the promise of a financing of 0.5 MEuro. This important economic contribute to the research activities of their Department is the only possible reason I can imagine for explaining to myself how it is possible that so many respectable and competent scientists could have explicitly supported such miraculous energy results, and so evidently wrong.

Well, let's go now to the opposite end of the fusion temperature range: the hot one. In this case the funding at stake is enormously higher. The ITER project has on its yearly budget 200 MEuro specifically devoted to the research, and this is only part of what the developed countries devolve to the research on ITER and the hot fusion in general. This funding is based on the expectations that the enormous technological and practical problems, that have delayed by dozens of years - with respect to the first too optimistic forecasts - the achievement of a useful controlled hot fusion, will be resolved in the next (how many?) decades. The big problem is that these forecasts are mostly made by the same physicists which benefit of the funding to their sector. How can we trust them? Who tells us if they are right or wrong?

If we look at the Ecat affair, the answers are not encouraging. After more than 5 years, no one of the academicians involved personally in the tests admitted that the calorimetric data were wrong. In the meanwhile, their affirmations raised a so high level of public expectancy that many Parliamentary initiatives, in more than one countries, asked the Governments to increase the fund to the research on CF. This affair provides us with a paradigmatic example of a perverse cycle - wrong scientific claims, public expectations, political decisions, research funding, more wrong scientific claims - which could be heavily contributing to misguide the whole society toward a fatal energetic trap.

It's extremely urgent, IMO, that this kind of perverse cycles be interrupted, the scientific truth restored, and the public trust in the academic research, adequately protected against any possible detrimental effects of this almost unavoidable "conflict of interest".

Quote from Ascoli65

In the meanwhile, their affirmations raised a so high level of public expectancy that many Parliamentary initiatives, in more than one countries, asked the Governments to increase the fund to the research on CF. This affair provides us with a paradigmatic example of a perverse cycle - wrong scientific claims, public expectations, political decisions, research funding, more wrong scientific claims - which could be heavily contributing to misguide the whole society toward a fatal energetic trap.

Of course, You are talking about hot fusion !!

The kiddy claim of our grand fathers, which completely misunderstood the nature of the sun???

Quote from cam

In this Forum much has been written about calorimetry; nothing about gamma radiation detection. Focardi reaction - the one reported in Rossi's first patent patent application - delivers prompt gammas, easily detectable.

Prompt gammas are obviously detectable. But the excited states that normally produce them might relax via other channels, e.g., something akin to internal conversion, when taking place in an electron-rich environment.

Quote from joshua cude

If anyone other than you does not think that is whacky, I'm curious who.

This is the Internet, and as we've seen on this forum, there is always a handful of people who will believe anything.

Quote from Eric Walker

Prompt gammas are obviously detectable. But the excited states that normally produce them might relax via other channels, e.g., something akin to internal conversion, when taking place in an electron-rich environment.

Yes the excited states might decay by other channels. But internal conversion is a relatively slow process compared to gamma decay. It is extemely improbable that internal conversion like processes can suppress gamma emission in every case. We need to look for different explanations for the absence of gammas. The obvious candidate is fragmentation.