Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

Look at the link I gave. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvsy8 Science is currently broken

I think this attitude of yours gets to the heart of the difference between the fringe of enthusiastic Rossi supporters and everyone else. You have lost faith in science and are proceeding without it. Whereas everyone else, including a subset that maintain some curiosity about whether Rossi has something, continue to place some trust in the scientific enterprise, despite its warts (incl. the treatment of LENR researchers).

Enclosing it in oil and measuring temperature rise is fine I guess, but as oldguy says. One need to know more details about the setup to exclude mistakes.

Also I would like to add that in order to verify the setup one needs to know for sure that no hidden source of energy goes in to the system. When I analyze

the hole story I tend to picture a tinkerer that tinker until a results appear and for these features most most certainly there should be mistakes done in the

past. It is damning that we don't know a iota of an admitted mistakes. An honest researcher that enter fields where his expertise is lacking should by all logic

fall into a trap from time to time. There is a lot of argument that this has been the case earlier by none admitted is admitted by Rossi. Still there might have been a strong

obvious effect in the past that orginates all effort. Perhaps it is now tamed. But we shall probably not know after the test. My best hope is that we will know for sure

that either it 's fake or an effect after the test. Also something I would like to know is how the effects deteriorates. A mistake will generate an effect for eternity and

having proof that the effect diminishes with time is a good indicator of a true effect.

That's a bit hard, Rossi has had some success. His white board full of equations has nailed down the electrical power going into a 1R brown resistor.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

You are suffering from Bob's disease. I never sad that. What I said was I don't automatically assume the man is wrong until the facts are in, unblike you.

It does not matter that you did not say it. I am not saying you said it, and you are unlikely to acknowledge it, for it sounds a little embarrassing. But I do not need you to acknowledge it. I am saying that your attitude and what you would encourage others with regard to how to approach Rossi is a kind of inverse science. And it is obvious to all (and possibly to you as well) that I am correct on this point.

That is something entirely apart from the importance of waiting until all of the facts are available or assuming that Rossi is wrong, which doesn't bear upon your statement that "As time has passed he has learned more and I accept his present claims unless they are proved wrong. Rather like in court you assume the person is innocent until proven guilty."

Quote from Eric Walker

I am saying that your attitude and what you would encourage others with regard to how to approach Rossi is one of inverse science. And it is obvious to all (and possibly to you as well) that I am correct on this point.

I'll have to defend AA a little here. Science is about the scientific method. AA has never dissed on that. He is dissing on the scientific establishment NOT strictly following the scientific method. AA has said wait and see what Rossi has. Wait and see what the experiments bear out. At least that is how I understand his position. And I can fully get behind that.

If onlookers such as ourselves adopt an attitude of "you assume the person is innocent until proven guilty," it is we who are being antiscientific. I get that some people are ok with that. It's just an observation (and kind of a damning one).

One can assume that Rossi is mistaken or worse and still allow for other outcomes. It is good and desirable to ask, "where's the beef?"

A science experiment is designed to support or refure a theory. Rossi's show is a demonstration of a product, a black box, no theory involved, does the produce work or not: apples and oranges.

Quote from axil

Who can say that LENR gets energy from nuclear processes. It could be extracting energy from the vacuum , or from axions, or from dark energy or dark matter or from magnetic resonance.

Nope. Those sources are ruled out. Pd-D LENR produces helium in the same ratio to the heat as D+D fusion, so it is fusion.

If you don't believe that, you are wrong.

I do not know whether Ni-H LENR exists, but if it does, it is likely to be H-H fusion. I do not believe there are different, unrelated reactions going on with metal hydrides. That would violate what McKubre calls the conservation of miracles.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

Yes you did. You put it in quotes,

The rest is just waffle trying to change the subject. You should know better than to put words words in someone's mouth. particularly as they are words I don't agree with.

I removed the quotes from something I had written when it occurred to me that they could be misconstrued as quoting you, when what I intended to do was to summarize something you were saying. If it's the same thing as what you had in mind, the quotes are no longer there.

The rest is not waffling; it is explaining why the attitude you have recommended people adopt is unscientific. Please elaborate on how I'm trying to change the subject from the very clear statement of yours that "you assume the person is innocent until proven guilty," which is a description of inverse science. I have attempted to keep your attention focused on this statement.

Do you agree or disagree that you wrote this?

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

No, not every one of them. He sometimes gets carried away. As time has passed he has learned more and I accept his present claims unless they are proved wrong. Rather like in court you assume the person is innocent until proven guilty. You ALWAYS assume he is guilty until proven innocent.

(Emphasis mine.)

Quote from axil

A science experiment is designed to support or refure a theory. Rossi's show is a demonstration of a product, a black box, no theory involved,

Rossi's experiments show that his device does not work. It produces no excess heat. You have not read Rossi's Penon report, so you cannot dispute what I say here. You have no idea what he did or what he claims.

Quote from maryyugo

[Assume guilty . . .] That is because Rossi was found guilty of causing the Petroldragon disaster, several other crimes in Italy, he obviously and clearly defrauded CERL/DOD with claims to high efficiency thermoelectric converters, he never did a single adequate test/demo of the ecat,

Well, that is dragging in a lot of external stuff. I guess it is justified in some sense, but as I have said before, we would not want to reject science done by Robert Stroud (the bird man of Alcatraz) just because he was a homicidal lunatic and an extreme liar. He did good science! His book is still in print.

The main thing is, in science, programming, engineering or any other technical discipline, you should always assume there is a mistake until you have lots of proof that the answer is right. The result is guilty until proven innocent. The result, not the person -- although in Rossi's case based on experience it is safe to conclude that the person is also guilty. That is a judgment call.

In the Penon report anyone can see he is wrong, and probably guilty. That is why Axil and others who worship in Rossi's personality cult refuse to look at that report. You don't even need to look at his history and his past. The report fails on its own merits.

As I have pointed out previously, you may be wrong to say he has never done an adequate test of the e-cat. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LeviGindication.pdf

You have not found a technical error in this paper. It is reasonable to reject it in view of what followed, but that is not a technical error. It is a judgment call. You tend to reject papers for no reason, such as every paper written by McKubre, Fleischmann, Miles and several hundred other researchers. Papers you say you have not even read. So your judgement calls are flawed, to say the least. Since you accept or dismiss evidence you have not looked at, I would say you have more in common with Axil than with me.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

What I said was I don't automatically assume the man is wrong until the facts are in, unlike you.

Ah, but you should automatically assume that. That is how science is done. Assume the man and the answer are wrong until they are proven right. That's the whole point others are making here, which you seem to be oblivious to. You are violating the scientific method and common sense, and you are ignoring the lessons of history.

That is also how programming, engineering and other technical disciplines are done. If they were not, programs and airplanes would crash all around us, and self-driving cars would always drive themselves into ditches or stop at shadows, which is what they did for the first several years of development. Things always start off drastically wrong, and gradually become a little right, and then a little more.

In Rossi's case, the Penon report shows that he is drastically wrong, to such an extent I am sure it was deliberate. I have never seen such outrageous nonsense, and with all the papers I have edited, I have seen a lot of nonsense!