Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions

Quote from maryyugo

Anyway, it is absurd to think national labs and major universities would refuse to test a working LENR reactor.

Any professor without tenure who tries to study cold fusion will be summarily fired, and/or threatened with deportation. I know several who suffered that fate. Any professor or national laboratory researcher who so much as suggests a meeting about cold fusion will be in deep trouble. Robert Park and others have vowed to "root out and fire" anyone in the government or government supported labs who tries to do an experiment or talks about or holds meetings about cold fusion. Since most university labs have government support, that covers nearly all.

("Root out and fire" is how Park himself described his actions and the actions of government officials working with him, in a talk he gave at the APS that I attended.)

Look what happened to Mel Miles, a Fellow of China Lake. ("Fellow" means a distinguished scientist who can work on any topic he chooses. This is like having tenure.) When he persisted in doing cold fusion, and published a peer-reviewed paper, the management of the lab was so upset, they cut off his finding, then cut off his telephone, and then assigned him to a menial job in a warehouse. You will find the letters from the laboratory management and Miles' responses at LENR-CANR.org. If they do that to one of world's top electrochemists with a long resume of distinguished accomplishments, imagine what they would do to a young scientist without tenure.

This thread is supposed to be about Rossi, not about LENR in general. Of course, people use whatever credibility is associated with LENR to validate their support of Rossi. That is a total red herring, regardless of what the truth about LENR might be. But it is just getting lost in the weeds arguing about the much-disputed Lugano test or the absurd Doral circus. Those things have been beaten to death and those who still embrace them are simply using a special filter to interpret the facts at hand. No, Rossi has provided us with the pure and distilled essence of his farce with the QuarkX and that is what is most remarkable. The salient facts are:

1) The QuarkX is absurdly, jaw-droppingly, hilariously impossible and nonsensical in every way.

2) There is absolutely zero evidence of any sort for its existence at all.

And yet, the Rossi faithful believe that the QuarkX is "the answer". That tells me all I need to know about anyone who still thinks Rossi is for real.

@Jed Rothwell

... only a quote [note quotations marks], a quote I don't agree with [see appended snap].

Quote from THHuxleynew

@IHFB. You start from a premise - LENR obviously works at commercial levels - that few hold. You then try to make subsequent facts fit this premise. To do so you need to brand pretty well everyone in the world as either stupid or part of a conspiracy to suppress LENR.

Well, I was simply referring to CalTech in that post. And if don't think they were underhanded with respect to cold fusion, I would encourage you to read the early issues of Infinite Energy. They documented it all in excruciating detail. It might make you lose a little faith in our institutions, but it is worth the read.

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

Something else the biased writers in this thread miss is that thanks to Robert Park and DOE it is virtually impossible to get a patent for any cold fusion device.

The Patent Office policy was issued before Park got involved. Despite this policy, some people have gotten patents. The policy is here:

http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/PatentOfficeMemo.jpg

Most of the cold fusion patent applications I have seen did not deserve to be approved, in my opinion. David French offered good advice about patents, here:

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

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

Academia's consensus opinion being challenged and huge grants for hot fusion, solar power and wind being threatened.

Probably not solar power and wind. Those sources of funding are different. There is no doubt that the locus of opposition was the hot fusion (plasma fusion) program.

Solar and wind companies probably will fight cold fusion if it becomes generally known that the effect is real. Maybe not, because they do not fight one-another. Coal interests fight everyone, but especially wind, because it is eating their lunch. I mean they are competing directly. 4% of electricity was from wind in 2014. In March 2017, it was 10% of all electricity. Those shares came directly out of the market share for coal, because coal plants are the oldest and first to be retired. In North America, wind resources are concentrated in mid-continent mainly to the north, so wind produces 37% of electricity in Iowa, but nothing in Georgia. Wind produces more than 10% of electricity in Texas. There is so much available at night, some power companies offer free electricity at night in return for a surcharge during the day. They encourage people to do laundry, recharge electric cars, or leave the air conditioning on at night.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/1…ial-free-electricity.html

Coal companies have lately been attacking oil and gas companies, because gas now generates more electricity than coal.

Quote from maryyugo

To what do you attribute such widespread and apparently nearly universal hostility and malevolence? Nobody wants cheap and clean power?

I suggest you read what opponents themselves say. See for yourself why they are hostile. I summarized their views here:

http://pages.csam.montclair.ed…lski/cf/293wikipedia.html

Mallove and I quoted them here:

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

The opponents have written books describing their views. As far as I know, they wrote only one technical paper that discusses actual results (other than Shanahan), which is here:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

The other technical papers by opponents can be summarized as, "theory says it can't happen so it must be a mistake."

I think opponents are sincere and they mean what they say, so these are the real reasons. I have no doubt that Park sincerely believes all cold fusion researchers are "frauds, criminals and lunatics" as he puts it. He wrote that in the Washington Post, and told me that himself in person, and he told many others. He knows nothing about the research because, like you, he refuses to read anything. (He refuses to read papers because he is certain they are wrong. You don't read them because you cannot understand them, which is a valid reason, but it means you should have no opinion about them.) Anyway, if I were like Park, and I knew nothing about cold fusion but I was sure the researchers are frauds, criminals and lunatics, I too would oppose it.

Quote from maryyugo

I think I asked the wrong question. How do you know the conspiracy against cold fusion is so widespread?

It is not widespread. I know most of the leading people such as Park, the directors at Los Alamos and China Lake who fired researchers, and the people in the plasma fusion program. There was widespread hostility toward cold fusion from the start by many scientists, for the reasons listed in the two documents I pointed to above. When there is already widespread hostility, it takes only a handful of powerful people at places like the APS and the DoE to prevent research. All they need to do is cut funding and destroy reputations and careers. There are two steps, which any powerful insider can take. First, publish a few articles in the Washington Post, the New York Times and Scientific American accusing the scientists of fraud. Second, make sure the scientists are not allowed to respond. Do not let them publish articles or letters to the editor. They will soon be fired.

This worked better in the 1990s before the rise of the internet, when the mass media had more influence. But it still works today.

By the way, this was not a conspiracy, which is usually defined as secret and organized. This was done in the open. The people who destroyed cold fusion brag about it to this day. It was not a bit organized as far as I can tell. Park and the people who harassed researchers and sabotaged experiments did not coordinate. The fraud at MIT was thrown together by them on short notice, as described by Mallove. It was not the product of careful thought and it was not vetted by a conspiracy of experts. It was amateur, inept and anyone who glances at the data can see it is fraud, not unlike the Penon report. You can see this yourself on p. 23 here:

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

Quote from maryyugo

And how could it possibly be effective against high power, clear cut LENR such as Defkalion and Rossi claimed and Brillouin and Miley claim?

No one in the scientific establishment attacked any of these people as far as I know. Few have heard of them, and no one takes them seriously. No one cares about them because they are not trying to get funded by the DoE; they are not trying to do research in national labs or university labs; and they never try to publish in a journal.

(I am not familiar with high power claims made by Miley.)

Quote from maryyugo

There are many open minded entrepreneurs, such as Kimmel, Page and maybe even Gates who would snap up such a wonder in an instant if Musk or Bezos didn't grab it first!

Gates attended meetings at the ENEA. I have heard he is involved in the field but I have no detailed information. I have no idea whether the others you list have heard of cold fusion or not.

Let me add that on rare occasions I have talked to investors and captains of industry from outside the field. That is, people who did not come to me for information. Most of them believe the comic book versions of cold fusion described in Wikipedia, the Washington Post and Scientific American. These investors have never seen the scientific literature. They do not know it exists. They think the effect was never replicated and that no peer-reviewed paper on it was published. If I believed that, I wouldn't invest in it.

Quote from maryyugo

Not to mention GM, GE, General Atomics, and of course China! And then, there was Darden who gambled on LENR, is perhaps still doing it, and look where it got him so far!

General Atomics did some good work. GE did superb work, verifying the effect. The project was clobbered by managers who did not believe it and who did not want to spend any money on it. This happened at several other companies and universities.

Quote from maryyugo

No, I don't think there is any lack of investment potential or market out there.

You have no technical knowledge of this research so your views are worthless. You have no basis to judge whether there is a potential market. You also have no knowledge the history of the field because you have not bothered to read Mallove or Beaudette. You have not met with government officials at the DoE or the Japanese or Italian ministries, or with Robert Park, or with investors or anyone else. You have not read what they said in their official reports. I have, so I know what I am talking about. You don't know what you are talking about, and you couldn't be more wrong.

I suggest you make an effort to learn something about this subject (or any subject) before discussing it, and before expressing an opinion.

Like Rossi, some of Papp's stuff is plausible and the experiments documented (eg explosion tests). Local Chemistry professor (no obvious fraud) ... and a TRACTOR MECHANIC certifying the brake horse power. You can fool a chemistry professor, but you can't fool a tractor mechanic.

On Rossi : I don't think he knew the difference between average and true RMS, so in this case I think he was mistaken, not fraudulent. He says (yeah, yeah) he immediately ran the hotcat with a variac, and got good results. I'd have to look into the difference between average and true RMS on the input to the control box. I suspect voltage would be pinned to mains, and current might be spikey.

I also suspect that the swedish engineer who discovered the RMS problem quit too soon. Average and true RMS are identical at 100% (full-power) and 0% (self-sustaining). I don't know if Rossi had the opportunity to set up a long (greater than thermal mass) self-sustaining mode while the engineer was there. (Full-on ... Full off modulation).

I don't believe Rossi invented the use of the thermal camera (Seem's to be Levi's baby, since the other Lugano team members deferred to him). Or knew about the emissivity problems. So again, mistaken, not fraudulent.

(The customer site is another matter entirely).

Quote from Alan Fletcher

Like Rossi, some of Papp's stuff is plausible and the experiments documented (eg explosion tests).

Papp used noble gas and recently some interesting effects have been detected like stable molecules Ag/Xe-H₃⁺ ... Time will judge his experiments!

Quote from maryyugo

He, Josephson, Jed, the Ampenergo people, IH and many others were taken in hook, line and sinker by Defkalion and Rossi!

I think that is an exaggeration of my role in all of this. However, there is some truth to it. People who are willing to look at something like cold fusion tend to be more open minded than people who reject all novel claims or anything that even appears to violate textbook science. Most scientific claims turn out to be wrong, so people such as Robert Park and you, who automatically attack any new claim without knowing the first thing about it, will be right most of the time. That means your "views" have no more validity than a Magic 8 Ball, but it makes you look good.

The other reason is that people such as the late J. Schwinger, Fleischmann and I are strongly oriented to experimental science. We take it for granted that when replicated experiments conflict with theory, the experiments always win; theory always loses. This is an old-fashioned way of doing science. Modern scientists under age 40 tend to believe the textbooks are Holy Writ that cannot be wrong and must not be questioned. Schwinger and Fleischmann wrote the textbooks and had various effects named after them, so they knew darn well there are many mistakes and many incomplete and unknown areas in science.

Quote from Alan Fletcher

On Rossi : I don't think he knew the difference between average and true RMS, so in this case I think he was mistaken, not fraudulent. He says (yeah, yeah) he immediately ran the hotcat with a variac, and got good results.

Some of his early experiments seemed positive, as did the first Levi experiment, as I have often pointed out. The one-year test was full-out, in-your-face fraud. That casts doubt on the previous results, to say the least.

A person who rejects all novel results will reject the first Levi report:

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

A more open minded person like me will wait for a follow up test. In this case, the follow-up was Lugano, which was a bust. As I said, most results turn out to be wrong, so when you always bet on failure, you have a high batting average and you look good. It resembles a roulette wheel with 90 black and 10 red slots. Bet on black every time and you will win so often, people may assume that you are always right, or that you have some special insight.