He was not the only person who had a renewed interest in LENR due to Rossi. I have admitted that myself. Plenty of others have said the same without attributing it to Rossi's making a grand interest onto the scene. So, is there something wrong with that, or are you just stirring up trouble?
When LENR is accepted as real, the historians will have to sort out exactly how much a role a conman played in jump-starting a science on life support. There is a certain irony to the whole thing. It should make for some good books at least, and will earn a special chapter in the annals of sciences weird stories.
Now time for you do something productive. Why don't you start looking at more of the videos and tell us which ones you see some promise in?
I am well aware that many people had a renewed interest in LENR due to Rossi, or better to say, thanks to their confidence in the competence of the UniBo professors who supported his claims. This is understandable for laymen with little scientific knowledge. It's much less plausible for those who teaches at the university, because errors and inconsistencies in the Ecat tests were so evident since the first demonstration in Bologna, on January 14, 2011.
Ecat defects could have been easily and immediately detected also by the experts in the field, but the support of the LENR community for Rossi was almost unanimous and lasted many years, during which Ecat became synonymous with cold fusion. Even today, the most followed threads on L-F, apart from OT subjects such as Covid, are dedicated to Rossi.
The Rossi's saga is an evident example of a collective mirage, in which the opinion of an entire community of experts was influenced by their positive bias toward their field. It took several years to convince most of them that they were wrong about Rossi and to close the threads on this forum dedicated to him, but almost no one is now willing to admit that he was wrong on Rossi, including the prominent speaker of the presentation about "Risk and Reputation".
The same goes for F&P: they were wrong. Their 1992 videos, the only truly meaningful videos in CF, prove that they mistaken both the conclusions in their most important paper reporting their most important experiment. Historians will tell how many more years it will take for the LENR community to become aware of the F&P's mistakes, as they did with Rossi's.
The NAVSEA-DARPA initiative, exposed by Barham during his presentation at ICCF24, has the chance to shorten this conversion period, if the program described in slide 3 will be coherently implemented. This is why I agree with your pick on this presentation as the most likely to sway a skeptic, … in the right direction, I mean.
The presentation on "Risk and Reputation" is also very important because it analyzes the opportunity of pursuing the CF/LENR research in the context of the current epochal threats to human civilization and even to its existence.
The speaker approach is well summarized by his seafaring analogy, he said: "I pointed out that for hungry sailors missing a passing island could be just as deadly as hitting an iceberg". But this parallel assumes that sailors are unwilling to change the sailing direction and they firmly believe that sooner or later an island will appear on the horizon. Both of these assumptions are very bad choices for shrewd sailors. Instead, they should have considered in time the option of not straying too far from the coast in a direction where no one can assure they will find another suitable landing place. In such a scenario, the deadly choice is believing the siren suggestions that ensure the existence of flourishing islands ahead. Therefore, along with the risks of false positives and false negatives, the Bertrand Russel's successor should have taken into accounts, in his evaluation on the opportunity to pursuing such a "low probability high impact" research, the higher risk of spreading false hopes.
And this is exactly the current sad situation of humanity. We have been attracted by the sirens of limitless energy provided by nuclear fusion (I am referring mainly to the hot one) and they have diverted us offshore further and further, to a no island zone, from where it will be very painful for a minority of us to regain the safe shore of a sustainable balance between our consumptions and the resources of the Earth.
I think, that one of the main task of future historians will be to find and unmask these sirens. The big, older and hot one, as well as the small, younger and cold will be mentioned on the same pages of their books.
