@ Eric Walker,
a premise. You used twice the word "innocent". This is not a law court. I don't
want to make any accusation. All of us use energy. We are using it in
such amount and quality that nobody in the future will be able to have
the same, but we need it to survive in this society, so all of us are
guilty, and innocent at the same time. All I would like to understand
are the facts, the role of the people and organizations involved in
this affair, and how much conscious they were of the reality of the
facts. Nothing more.
I find (4) somewhat improbable, because there would have to be a lot of collusion/collaboration between different parties to pull it off
Yes, there have been many different parties involved in the Ecat affair, but only a few of them would need to be aware of the intimate nature and of the real purposes of this initiative. This is because among those who collaborated to carry it out there are a lot of different motivation of much lower level, for instance of psychological nature. As JR reminded on Vortex (1), "scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe." Well, probably not everybody, hopefully a minority. But it means that if you allocate a certain budget for whichever research, you will find for sure so many available scientists to spend the entire budget. So, in order to carry on an hypothetical farcical initiative you have just to control an appropriate budget, and little more.
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you seem to want to get the University of Bologna in trouble for getting caught up in all of this, but my own impression is that its role seems to have been as an unwitting and largely innocent bystander.
No, that's not my aim. I'm very sorry that this affair involves an Italian university. But the problem is much more wider. It doesn't specifically affect the UoB, it involves the whole academic e scientific world engaged in the research for an energy breakthrough. Think to the flop of the NIF initiative, or to the misrepresentation of the performances of the large tokamaks such as ITER, as recently denounced by Krivit (2).
But here we are talking about the Ecat, and, unfortunately, all the scientific confidence in the reliability of its performances has been provided by members of the Physics Department of UoB. Even today, 6 years after the demo, some people still appeal to the scientific authoritativeness of Focardi, or to the credibility of the first Levi tests.
These scientists (not only those in Bologna) are the vanguard of the humankind, they should show the right track, and correct themselves immediately as soon as they realize that they were wrong. Did it happen?
(1) http://www.mail-archive.com/vo…@eskimo.com/msg97821.html
(2) http://news.newenergytimes.net…1/12/the-selling-of-iter/