Perhaps I overstated the case a bit but Dr. Price was highly enthusiastic about Rossi in 2015:
Rossi, however, has been going from strength to strength. While it is fair to say that the jury is still out, there has been a lot of good news for my hopes of a free dinner in the past couple of years. There were two reports (in 2013 and 2014) on tests of Rossi’s device by teams of Swedish and Italian physicists whose scientific credentials are not in doubt, and who had access to one of his devices for extended periods (a month for the second test). Both reports claimed levels of excess heat far beyond anything explicable in chemical terms, in the testers’ view. (The second report also claimed isotopic shifts in the composition of the fuel.) Since then, there have been several reports of duplications by experimenters in Russia and China, guided by details in the 2014 report...
... There are credible reports that a 1MW version of his device, producing many times the energy that it consumes, has been on trial in an industrial plant in North Carolina for months, with good results so far. And Rossi’s US backer and licensee, Tom Darden – who has a long track record of investment in pollution-reducing industries – has been increasingly willing to speak out in support of the LENR technology field. (Another investor, the UK-based Woodford Funds, reports that it conducted ‘a rigorous due-diligence process that has taken two and half years’.)
Yes, he does say the proverbial "jury is still out" but then he waxes enthusiastic as if Rossi's main problem was his "reputation trap." The entire report reflects serious lack of understanding about what was done, how and by who. It also ignores Rossi's long record of cheating and lying while accomplishing nothing provable of any worth ever.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-…ossibility-of-cold-fusion
And of course, Price's Rossi probability is now at 50% whereas it should hover near zero. Rossi is about as likely to come through for believers as is Madoff. And hopefully, someday he will end up in the same place.
Price goes on:
But if the potential news is this big, why haven’t most of you heard about Rossi, or Godes, or any of the other people who have been working in the area (for many years, in some cases)? This is where, from a philosopher of science’s point of view, things get interesting.
But the reason the average person has not heard of Rossi or Brillouin is not particularly interesting or controversial as Price implies. It's simply because the evidence for the veracity of these folks has not risen anywhere near the criteria required to attract mainline science, reporters and entrepreneurs. And Rossi's reputation isn't some sort of arbitrary "trap." He's genuinely and incontrovertibly been proven a crook and the author of several scams and one major environmental disaster. I am calling out Price's amazing ability to overlook all of this evidence when he still ascribes a 50% probability to the truth of Rossi's claim. Sorry, but that is simply ignorant!
