Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

Quote from Shane D.

The staff recently debated shutting down the Rossi thread to up the quality of the forum...which has been trending down in quality lately, but decided it's overall contribution is still positive. But it was a close call.

Oh holy shit, what path has this forum taken???

I got a ‘suspension week’ from Alan a year ago, voluntered to extend my time off for another 14 months, and now - because end of year is near - it came into my mind I should check if the ‘End of the Carbon Age is Nigh’ due to progress in LENR research.

I hoped to read that Rossi has finally kicked off his ‘robotized e-cat production lines’, or - if this would not have happened yet (because Rossi needs again to reconfigure the robots for the superior E-cat X-Gen version) - then I at least anticipated reports that there is a breaktrough from other ‘promising LENR endeavours’.

However, no breaking news of independent verification of excess heat from ‘knoted wires’, or from ‘palladium coated nickel meshes’,... and the ‘lovely gammas’ seem to have fallen from the stage at all.

Instead of LENR, the most discussed topic on this forum appears to be Covid19 now.

That’s understandable, since Covid19 affected all of us.

But what I don’t get, how is it possible that LENR experts were able to become epidemologists, viriologists , M.D. ... in no time...?

Self educated arm chair experts (probably trained by watching YouTube) believe that they know better how to treat Covid-19 than all the professional medicals who work daily on Covid-19 cases... and even give medical advice. Really???

Well, @Shane - I guess you will have quite some work to do... but there is definetly a lot of room to raise the quality of this forum.

Maybe I check in year-end of 2021 again and see if you have been successfull.

Good Luck!

It would be a tedious task, but it would be interesting to know what percentage of posts at the LENR Forum this year were actually related to LENR. I suppose anything about Rossi’s adventures shouldn’t count since he has determined that “the Rossi Effect” has nothing to do with LENR.

Quote from Alan Smith

The quality of the forum is in large part dependent on the quality of members inputs. Reflect on that.

The quality of any forum depends subjectively on what one perceives as quality, which many times is dependent on one's personal agenda.

For example, I think the ECW members believe their forum quality is tremendous, from their agenda of supporting Rossi.

I believe the quality of most of the posts on ECW is horrendously bad.

I believe the quality of the posts on this subforum are quite good, in that they supply readers a realistic analysis of Rossi's claims and behavior.

Quote from Alan Smith

... and insistence that you know things s about publishing papers that people far cleverer and more experienced than you do (I exclude myself here) just makes you look petulant and not worth arguing with.

I said earlier ...

"Sometimes you have to search for a home for a manuscript. This isn't unusual. Sometimes you have to shelve a manuscript and hope that you can repackage parts of it for later use. Some projects never come out of the file drawer. That is pretty painful if your grants depend partly on your publishing record! But it is par for the course. For everyone.

I don't see any of this as a reason not to insist that people publish their work. Academic publishing is a complex ecology within which niches form in response to demand."

Ask your friend if he disagrees with any of this. I genuinely think that he won't.

Quote from Alan Smith

See the original quote below. Looks like a search to me, by somebody who is a member of at least two learned societies.

Try asking

Quote from Alan Smith

Bruce-H - if I didn't think better of you I would suspect you of trolling me. Happy new year.

If you had had the curiosity to ask, I think your friend would have responded that my remarks sound like a fairly ordinary description of academic life.

Happy New Year

Brian Josephson is member of a very small and valued set - the Nobel prize winners - and has encountered many troubles in papers publishing, too.

From

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/

it's easy to understand why.

Quote from Ahlfors

Brian Josephson is member of a very small and valued set - the Nobel prize winners - and has encountered many troubles in papers publishing, too.

From

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/

it's easy to understand why.

I remember reading something very similar from Richard Feynman

Quote from Curbina

That’s a completely spurious comparison, you can’t put both in the same box, at all.

For two of the most authoritative supporters of the field, Rossi is put in the same box with F&P.

Brian Josephson: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1150242 (see transcript)

Huw Price: https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-…ossibility-of-cold-fusion

Quote from Curbina

Now that we are talking about how hard is to publish I am amazed no one has yet brought up Julian Schwinger who was so pissed off by the academic journals blockage of “cold fusion” that he resigned from the APS because of it.

He resigned, and then he found a home for his manuscript https://www.infinite-energy.co…ine/issue1/colfusthe.html

Difficulty in publishing should not be a reason to take unpublished work seriously.

"Schwinger was a pioneering theorist in cold fusion. He felt that the bias of the physics community against cold fusion was based on inferences from hot fusion that are not valid in this new regime. He argued that the defense of cold fusion can be simply stated, "The circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion." He first submitted the results of his theoretical analysis of cold fusion to journals of the American Physical Society. He received such harsh treatment in the denial of publication of this work that as a symbolic gesture, he resigned his membership from the American Physical Society. This was no small step for someone who had been a leading member for over 50 years. In doing so he said, "The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

Undaunted, Schwinger did publish papers on cold fusion in other forums. He was the sole author of the following 8 papers on this subject:

1. "Nuclear Energy in an Atomic Lattice," Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion (Salt Lake City) pp. 130 - 136, March 28 -31 (1990).

2. "Nuclear Energy in an Atomic Lattice.1," Zeitschrift fur Physik D 15, pp. 221-225 (1990).

3. "Cold Fusion: A Hypothesis," Zeitschrift fur Naturforschung 45a, p. 756 (1990).

4. "Cold Fusion: Does It Have a Future?" in Evolutional Trends of Physical Sciences. Germany: Springer Verlag 1991. (From a talk delivered in Tokyo, 1990)

5. "Phonon Representations," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87, pp. 6983 - 6984 (1990).

- 4 -

6. "Phonon Dynamics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87, pp. 8370 - 8372 (1990).

7. "Nuclear Energy in an Atomic Lattice - Causal Order," Progress in Theoretical Physics 85, pp. 711 - 712 (1991).

8. "Cold Fusion Theory: A Brief History of Mine," Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion (Maui, 1993) ICCF-4 Transactions of Fusion Technology pp. ? - ? (1994).

He also presented a colloquium at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania entitled, "A Progress Report: Energy Transfer in Cold Fusion and Sonoluminescence."

When I first read Schwinger's papers on cold fusion, I thought that I may have spotted some errors in them. So I wrote him a letter on September 24, 1990, respectfully raising a couple of questions. I did not hear from him directly, but did speak with his devoted wife, Clarise. Because of my great admiration for Professor Schwinger, in co-authoring two reviews of cold fusion (International Journal of Theoretical Physics 33, pp. 617 - 670, 1994; and in Trans. Fusion Technol. 26, 3 (1994)) I felt badly about writing a critical review of his work. I wrote, "We hope that Schwinger will address the issues raised and clarify the situation." In hopes that he would resolve the questions that we raised, I again wrote to him in early 1994 sending him a copy of our paper. Perhaps because he was ill, he neither responded privately nor publicly. It would not have troubled me if he had proven me wrong."

https://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0303/0303078.pdf

Maybe if more had suggested a porcelain infused metal embedded lattice is may have gotten people thinking.

Schwinger boxes

Quote from Ascoli65

For two of the most authoritative supporters of the field, Rossi is put in the same box with F&P.

Brian Josephson: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1150242 (see transcript)

Huw Price: https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-…ossibility-of-cold-fusion

Both are interesting. It is also interesting to look back on these now that a number of years have passed and we can be in broad agreement that Rossi was a faker after all.

I am a bit dismayed that Josephson was so tolerant of Rossi never describing his materials and methods and not allowing independent replication. Scientists tend to be naive about how con men do their thing.

We can use the entire Rossi episode as a test case. What would have caught him out earlier?

1) Insisting on a complete and replicable description of materials and methods

2) Insisting on completely independent replication

3) Insisting on publication (of both original work and replications) in peer-reviewed journals

I note that the third requirement may have prevented the "Swedish professors" from publishing their work. Not because they wouldn't have been able to find a place to publish, but because they would then feel that their reputations are more on the line that they apparently do with the Arxiv preprint they released. As it is, they have slunk away from this flawed paper hoping that no one would notice. It is squalid, infamous, behaviour. If this were a real journal, such behaviour could even jeopardize their jobs.