ECW Poll: Your Thoughts on the E-Cat as a Commercially Viable Technology

Uh, jpav, $11.5 million US is not real money to you? That's what Rossi suckered IH into paying him for absolutely nothing that worked, as per IH's written statements to the court. How did you get no real money moving around? How do you see no swindle?

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So, mea culpa on this one. It appears there was no deliberate suppression by NASA. I must say, though, it would have been very helpful if NASA would have been more assertive about what they had observed in 1989 as many other institutions were mercilessly hammering P&F.

Huizenga called Cold fusion the "scientific fiasco of the century." He was right. It was a massive train wreck. Mistakes were made all over the place, and then a polarized rejection cascade was set up and continued. It can be very difficult to penetrate an information cascade, because "everyone knows ...." Even if nobody actually knows, or there are people who are informed and know, but what they know is different from the supposed consensus.

Reviewing the history, I see little in the way of deliberate suppression. Rather an opinion arose that the matter was clearly rejected, 'there was no basis for believing that..." , etc. And people who spoke up in favor of cold fusion or the possibility sometimes lost reputation and more. But there was no seriously organized suppression. This was not the oil companies, for example. Close to home would be the hot fusion physicists whose funding was seriously threatened in 1989, and that was a political nightmare.

But they were convinced it was bogus, and merely thought that they had to go through the motions.

Fiasco. Great word, God rest his soul. So, he was wrong, but, in fact, he did try to understand, and simply failed. I often point out that Huizenga recognized the significance of Miles.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

Prepare yourself for probably at least two reports using identical Lugano type reactors, tested many times.
With zero excess heat.

It's claimed that IH did attempt to confirm Lugano and failed, repeatedly.

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And gory details about what happens at several high temperature ranges, and what the emissivity actually is, using thermocouples.
Even thermocouple data from Lugano.

It has seemed odd to me that the Lugano report notes the presence of the internal thermocouple but then gives no readings from it, while claiming a reactor temperature that would destroy it.

I have blamed Rossi for withholding that information, but maybe he didn't. What I really wonder about Lugano is why Rossi was there at all. This did nothing but damage credibility. By this time, IH could have had a representative there, and instructions could have been provided to the Lugano team as to how to set up the reactor.

At the time, reviewing the Lugano report, it simply seemed to me like the same old same old for Rossi, creating doubt.

Lugano is fascinating because the error there cannot be directly blamed on Rossi, other than possible misinformation about damage from calibration. The lack of calibration is the first thing that experts noticed, looking at Lugano.

To me, relying on very complex calculations, with many opportunities for error, without having a common-sense evaluation confirming those results, seemed very, very odd.

Quote from jpav

So the premise is that IH wrote a check or bunches of checks amounting to $11.5 M for which there were no intermittent deliverable's or other metrics of progress. That would make them dumber than dirt, which is doubtful.

It's obvious to me that noobs show up without taking the time to study the sources. (Welcome, but ...)

Right now, the best sources would be the Rossi Complaint, telling his side, and the IH Amended Answer, telling theirs. Then there are hosts of other sources, too much, really. The Marianne Macy Interview with Darden last year gives a good picture of Darden and what he had in mind.

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This project easily would yield many billions to the owner of the IP.... that's real money.

Indeed. If it worked. And as a fraud, more than $100 million to Rossi and friends. Already, Rossi got $11.5 million, though he certainly had expenses. Yes. Real money.

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To me the litigation process is IP positioning.

By whom? It is claimed (by Rossi, I have seen no IH confirmation of this) that Rossi offered to return the money in return for the License back and that they declined. This, on Planet Rossi, seems to be treated as proof that IH is lying about not being able to confirm excess heat. However, read the Amended Answer all the way through. They provide as an alternate explanation that Rossi has a secret that actually works, but did not disclose it to them.

A hedge against the possibility that Rossi has a real technology that would then make moot their other investments in LENR would be worth something. How much is a difficult judgment call, but they are protecting at least $50 million and probably more before they are done. The status quo is that they already won. By investing in Rossi they established their own willingness to take risks, and they did, in fact, gather more investment, much more, and so, holding the License, they win either way.

If Rossi had been real, they'd have already been raking in license fees, being able to show interested parties truly independent testing, and being able to make their own devices available for test. It's obvious. So they are pretty much, now, reduced to "not real" or "refused to disclose." And this is not worth another $89 million to them.

One of the major LENR scientists has a theory that Rossi did have an effect and lost it. That has actually happened before in LENR history, because what made experiments work was often obscure, and not understood. So some experiments worked (i.e, generated anomalous heat), and then didn't. It's taken many years to navigate this. Rossi kept re-engineering instead of nailing his devices down and characterizing them as-they-were. So a process that worked might have been lost.

And when that happens to an inventor, what do they do? It could happen that they fake demonstrations, hoping to continue until they find it again. (And the original work might have seemed real to them ,but wasn't. Artifact.)

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If Rossi stopped trusting them he was correct to bail.

You would end up in court if you thought like that. Rossi, if his technology was real, could well have decided to bail, but actually bail.

Stop cooperating. And develop product in, say, Sweden, not conflicting with the License. Faking a test? No, no and no. Trouble with a capital T.

Fraud with a capital "Fucked."

It appears that Rossi was lying to IH in 2014, about the "customer." He was telling them what he thought they would want to hear. This "independent customer" nonsense is his denouement. It's preposterous on the face. The President of Leonardo Corporation as the President of the "independent customer"? Who did he think would be fooled by that?

He must have thought that once he had his hands on the reactor in Florida, it didn't matter what they think, and he was obviously ready with an enormous "Fuck you and everything you do" by July, 2015.

And then did he really imagine that a partner treated like that would pay, on the technicality of a faux "ERV" report? On what planet did he learn about business?

Ah. Italy. But he didn't learn. The last thing someone sane does, if they think so-and-so is the Mafia, is to disrespect them. There are exceptions for those who have it as a job, and that job is very dangerous.

In other words, if Rossi was right and IH was not to be trusted, how he handled it was extraordinarily foolish. If he was this way with the Mafia in Italy, he's lucky he didn't end up dead instead of merely in jail.

But this is Rossi. Terminal disrespect. Snakes and clowns.

Quote from Eric Walker

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
The lack of calibration is the first thing that experts noticed, looking at Lugano.

The lack of a calibration was the first thing I noticed and mentioned on Vortex (along with other people) hours after the Lugano report was made available. And I am so far from an expert on thermodynamics and heat measurement that I wouldn't know a thermocouple if I saw one.

Yes.

It's often the case that the attempted -- or real -- precise calorimetry is complex, but calibration can make it far simpler. So they have page after page of calculations, but, then, if they are claiming XE, there are two calibrations.

1. The apparent temperature of the device when power dissipation is known because it is input power, and this has been measured with a dummy cell across the expected range of input power.
2. The apparent temperature across a range of input powers that includes possible output power.

The second is difficult with high power as claimed -- though it could be done as a follow-up. The first, though, would have been easy. Sure. Slowly ramp the power up. Maybe even add a coil to add more heat, spread it out, perhaps.

But no calibration means that there is no simple, visible verification that, yes, this is what it looks like at 900 W input, and that can be compared with the actual device. And what we think it would look like is those photos we saw. Some of it glowing red.

As I recall, in 2011, Rossi was asked about control experiments, i.e, his device with no fuel, say. He said he didn't need them because he already knew what would happen -- nothing.

But nothing is not a happening, it's a story, an interpretation. What a control would show would be the behavior of the device with only input power. Not "nothing."

Now, Rossi had many ways of manipulating demonstrations, it seems. By changing the device constantly, it was never possible to confirm old results.

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The lack of a calibration was the first thing I noticed and mentioned on Vortex (along with other people) hours after the Lugano report was made available. And I am so far from an expert on thermodynamics and heat measurement that I wouldn't know a thermocouple if I saw one.

As abd says... In mid 2011 (!) I asked Rossi to use the built in heater in his original ecat to calibrate and also I asked him via email to run a blank control. His answer was words to the effect that: "Why should I do that? I already know what it will show." Can't argue against that faultless logic. That was when it first dawned on me that Rossi was probably nothing but a scammer. And a pretty stupid one.

The pseudonymous "Alsetalokin" (an anagram of Nikola Tesla) also noted at about the same time that the largest heater in the ecat was a big band heater wrapped around the device. It's location made it clear that it could only heat the coolant and not the interior of the ecat. That was another blatant indication of fraud. How weird that all this was ignored or never searched for by IH and they came to the same realization that Rossi had nothing. But they came to it $11.5M and 5 years later.