Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

I do not trust the judgment of the early testers (Penon, Lewan, the Lugano group). I get the sense that they are both invested in the results they reported, in terms of their reputations, and that hope clouds their objectivity, especially in specific cases. So I am pessimistic. But I lack more than very vague information about what they've done since their public reports, and I am always open to surprises that might change my assessment. One impression of mine I doubt will change: Rossi is allergic to rigorous testing.

Rossi's performance in the Doral show casts a pall over the prospect that he has anything.

A first person experience: The R'ster was claiming 450C and climbing in a demo while the handheld IR temp gun (with laser dot on) on a blackbody showed 275C. After spotting my actions ("how disrespectful of that guy" some of you folks thinking), the R'ster flipped what seemed to be two switches on his front panel and immediately claimed "we have a possible runaway" with a request for everyone to leave the room. I got the temp gun out after using my hand in a near field wave to get a better sense of the heat output from the device during the demo. I'm no walking thermocouple but knew there was no way his claimed temps were as high as his instrumentation was stating.

That is a gigantic delta - say no more, say no more.

Quote from Bruce__H

It is best to be clear what the Lugano report actually is. It is not a "published" paper as this term is usually thought of in the scientific community. It has not withstood scrutiny from expert reviewers as you see in most journals. Instead, ArXiv.org accepts and publishes preprints of articles with no peer review. There is some moderation but only to make sure that the paper is written in a general scientific style and that it will be posted under an appropriate subject heading.

Most researchers who put their preprints up on ArXiv.org do so in order to seek commentary from the community prior to actually submitting their work to a peer reviewed journal -- to just post a work on ArXiv.org and then never see it published in a regular scientific journal is a failure. But over 5 years there is no indication that the Lugano authors have ever paid the slightest attention to the responses to their paper. If they have prepared a revised manuscript and submitted it to journal somewhere then it has either been rejected or they are very slow in getting on with what people are assuming they must consider a central set of findings in one of the most significant invention in the history of humankind.

The ArXiv paper was posted just under 5 years ago. I assume that a work that has remained undefended and unreviewed for so long has now been abandoned and that the original authors have lost confidence in their findings. Most people used to how things are done in science would feel the same. Given this, I am amazed that the Lugano professors showed up at Mr Rossi's demo in November. What are they up to?

The Lugano report was not accepted for Arxiv publication, even, although the earlier, Ferrara, report was so published. It was instead published on the UoB site as an internal unrefereed report. TC pointed out here that the reason his comment was not published on Arxiv is that there was no similarly published paper to rebut (he therefore did not present it for any formal publication except lenr canr, which also links Lugano). So it is one informal report vs another.

TC said the Lugano authors never replied to him sending them a preprint: one of the authors acknowledged it and said he would pass it on for consideration. Then silence.

Quote from Dewey Weaver

A first person experience: The R'ster was claiming 450C and climbing in a demo while the handheld IR temp gun (with laser dot on) on a blackbody showed 275C. After spotting my actions ("how disrespectful of that guy" some of you folks thinking), the R'ster flipped what seemed to be two switches on his front panel and immediately claimed "we have a possible runaway" with a request for everyone to leave the room. I got the temp gun out after using my hand in a near field wave to get a better sense of the heat output from the device during the demo. I'm no walking thermocouple but knew there was no way his claimed temps were as high as his instrumentation was stating.

That is a gigantic delta - say no more, say no more.

Interesting. At what point in time did this happen? Was it during the one year Doral episode or was it earlier?

Quote from THHuxleynew

TC said the Lugano authors never replied to him sending them a preprint: one of the authors acknowledged it and said he would pass it on for consideration.

Good. So then at least we can be sure they know about the critique. What is your assessment on their behavior to this date and the fact that they seem to still be on the Rossi train?

Quote from argbo18

Maybe they might not be that interested in publishing their views on random Internet forums? And they might not care what any number of anonymous posters think? Seems though as some of them were present in Stockholm... And if their opinions have not changed, why should they even bother to say so?

They did not respond to questions and papers from Mike McKubre and others. They asked a group of scientists for questions. The scientists sent questions, but they did not respond. That is unbecoming of a scientist. It violates academic norms.

(I sent them a question too: "What color was the cell incandescence?" In the photos, it looks orange. If it was actually orange, and that is not an artifact of the camera, then their estimate of the temperature is wrong by a large margin and they had no excess heat. They did not respond to my question, or any of the others, as far as I know.)

Quote from Eric Walker

The main critiques were not anonymous. There was Bob Higgins's analysis, there was Thomas Clarkes's analysis, and (I vaguely recall) there was the GSVIT analysis.

Plus McKubre's:

http://www.infinite-energy.com…ne/issue118/analysis.html

This was not totally negative, but it raised many questions that the authors have not addressed, as far as I know.

Quote from JedRothwell

They did not respond to questions and papers from Mike McKubre and others. They asked a group of scientists for questions. The scientists sent questions, but they did not respond. That is unbecoming of a scientist. It violates academic norms.

I agree. Their behaviour is uncollegial at best. In real science, professional etiquette is a not a thing to be trifled with and the price people pay for simply turning their backs on their fellow researchers is that everyone in science sits on committees and inevitably a transgressor will come into the hands of someone he has treated shoddily. LENR isn't a mature field with stable finding sources so I don't know how this will play out here.

The only acceptable explanation I see for the behaviour of the Lugano professors is that they plan to publish a real paper soon. I recall within the last year that Rossi claimed they have replicated their original findings. The professors have not repudiated that statement so maybe that is about to happen. If Rossi's statement is false and yet they (the profs) have allowed it to stand, and attended Rossi's demo on top of it, that is even more outrageous. Some of these guys are serious people, but I put this out there for consideration ... are they stupid?

Potentially libellous comment removed. Alan.

Quote from argbo18

Good. So then at least we can be sure they know about the critique. What is your assessment on their behavior to this date and the fact that they seem to still be on the Rossi train?

We know from Mats and others that all the IR thermography work was handled by Levi, so it is probably only he who will know the critique. he showed in his comments to Mats a year after it that he still did not understand the real issue (technical details of this can be found here somewhere). The key Levi misunderstanding is lack of awareness that only band emissivity (not total emissivity) is relevant to the operation of single-wavelength IR cameras such as the Optris.

They must publicly be very embarrassed, and think that anything they say will just make things worse. It is unbecoming: as Jed points out a scientist would normally defend or retract major published errors. One human response to such a situation is to become highly defensive and find ways of avoiding all the contrary evidence and see oneself as still right. They perhaps feel that in spite of mistakes they have enough information of Rossi's stuff working, and they are still under the spell of his charisma.

In their comments before the Lugano debacle they showed themselves to be unhelpfully trusting of Rossi. Alas it is scientists who are most easy to deceive, because they cannot easily imagine somone deliberately lying about science. We know from the blog Shane posted here a while ago that Rossi is convincing and charismatic, a passionate and engaging talker, and that many scientists find him so. I can understand it, bullshit is possible in science as elsewhere. Most scientists (Feynman was a glowing exception) are specialists and no better than any one else at making sense of stuff outside their own specialism. It is only human to hope for something that would be as important and good as what Rossi promised.

I explain the Rossi phenomenon this way. Many people cannot reconcile Rossi both being the passionate, articulate, informed intellectual who is so charismatic (to those susceptible) and obviously cares more about his work than anything else, with someone who uses blatant deception. So they ignore evidence of deception.

We know he is both the scoundrel and the charismatic intellectual dinner companion.

Alan's protection racket continues. He's so far out on a limb that he must also be included in the cover story.

Alan - I predict that you'll eventually get tired of carrying that bucket around. Your implied balance remains out of balance

which is just as well.

Quote from THHuxleynew

We know he is both the scoundrel and the charismatic intellectual dinner companion.

How do you know? Did either you or Shane meet him? Or do you use second hand opinion for all that psychological profiling?

Quote from Bruce__H

. Given this, I am amazed that the Lugano professors showed up at Mr Rossi's demo in November. What are they up to?

I was pleasantly surprised that Alan Smith was at the presentation.The question I have is who was William Hurley looking for

when he looked back at the audience

during the Ecat presentation.

Was it the woman he talked to during the intermission.

Quote from Dewey Weaver

Alan - I predict that you'll eventually get tired of carrying that bucket around. Your implied balance remains out of balance

which is just as well.

Don't worry. I read the comment before it was removed. I'm curious to know it it represents the official view of IH though?

And I'm still curious to know if your thermometer encounter was during the Doral episode of before?

SPArg - check the transcripts.

Quote from argbo18

How do you know? Did either you or Shane meet him? Or do you use second hand opinion for all that psychological profiling?

Argbo - Shane's link was to a very long and well balanced comment from <can't remember name> who with husband was one of Rossi's early supporters. I recommend all interested to read it for insight.

As for Rossi being a scoundrel, have you read all of the Court witness statements? I have read most (all I will not claim) and they are revelatory. Like when Rossi, in an e-mail boasts about lying to his previous investor, faking a non-working test. That is a lie whether the test worked or not...

And then the customer saga.

Other things matter to me, like the heat exchanger that could never work even if it had been built, all evidence of which was repurposed. You need to read the whole collection to get a true understanding of just how dishonest Rossi was; little bits of it are not enough.