QuoteI disagree that it was so easy to detect. It all depends on your view of human nature. It only necessitates that you believe either one of the following: 1) people can change or 2) people can be falsely accused and persecuted. All along the way, it was evidently clear to me that it was possible that either AR was correct, a scammer, or self-deceiving. There were enough experts saying they thought the E-cat worked to make it seem possible. Also, the results of Brillouin and others with NiH made it seem possible. Indeed, AR himself can really seem genuine, philosophically deep, and apparently introspective. Some people are extremely talented and fooling others. I know it was obvious to you, and ordinarily it would have been to me, but there seemed to be additional complexities.
To be clear, I did not decide that Rossi was lying about ecats only, not even mainly, on his history and I did not consider his personality at all originally. I based my skepticism mainly on the experiments which were wildly deficient, clearly so, and easily remediable. And Rossi was told so by many people in many different places including his own sorry blog. Yet he did nothing to improve the tests. Instead, he did different tests, all with fresh deficiencies and always: the failure to permit calibrations and the deliberate ridicule of people who asked for calibrations and blank runs. Any honest inventor would have modified his method and repeated the same tests except that he would have performed them correctly. Nobody is too stupid to do that!
And the excuse that he wanted to deceive the world to think that he really had nothing so as to stifle competition was beyond ludicrous. First, he was supposedly selling plants. What do you think would happen to the first one he sold? It would be ruthlessly taken apart and reverse engineered and investigated. That's what. And Rossi had no competition anyway. And he supposedly had patent protection though the idiotic nature of the useless patent he got made it look even less likely that the ecats worked.
Then there was the look of the original ecats -- rusty junk put together with crude crummy tools by an octogenarian. Then there was Rossi crowing about non-accomplishments as if they were pure gold-- for example the absolutely meaningless self-certification of safety. Hey a pet rock can be certified safe.
All of the above was public knowledge long before Darden bought into the project. And none of the negativity requires consideration of Rossi's personality. However, consideration of his Petroldragon and thermoelectric projects revealed prior scamming and disasters and no record whatsoever of significant ability, knowledge or accomplishments in any aspects of nuclear engineering and design-- that should have given everyone pause.
But it wasn't his personality, sneaky and deceitful though it seemed.