Posts by LenrdSkynrd

Quote from Alan Smith

Incidentally, I hear Aureon/Safire still looking for cash, probably because some previous promises had too many strings attached.

So how do you know Aureon is looking for cash still, Alan Smith?

As an Aureon first-round investor, I didn't find too many strings attached. I certainly hope the SAFIRE team is "playing chess while others play checkers" with respect to its apparent foray into remediation. The energy stuff may come later. Or they may have no idea how to harness it. Or produce it reliably. Or, or, or...

The key is more frequent updates. Keep us in the loop. Let us know *something* is happening.

I probably wouldn't throw more money at the project at this point. But if they produce a device or repeatable process with vetted results, well, that could open the money spigots full blast.

Quote from Curbina

This arrived to mail inbox bin about an hour ago. Exploring the videos right now.

I don't believe any of those videos are new. If they are, they don't reveal any new details, as far as I can tell.

In any case, it's good to get an update. It appears Aureon is going the nuclear remediation route rather than the power generation route. I'm not sure I love that strategy, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. The energy market is $8 trillion annually. Why not focus on that? Big pieces of the pie are available there for the first truly alt-energy company to grab and enjoy. Maybe Brilliant Light Power is too far ahead of Aureon in terms of commercializing a device. Or maybe Aureon is having a lot of trouble figuring out how to harness an excess energy. Or they've miscalculated somewhere.

Whatever the situation, let's hope their updates come more frequently from this point on.

Quote from Alan Smith

Why don't you invite Monty to visit and answer some member's questions? He did it on ECW awhile back.

Well, like I said, as an investor I would prefer that the team spend every waking hour getting this thing commercialized, not fielding questions that he's unlikely to be able to provide specific answers to due to proprietary concerns. But that's my purely selfish reason. I understand that everyone who's even peripherally involved would love to hear more from the team.

As someone who's already bought in I don't need to be convinced of anything regarding the potential value of the project. I just want them to get it done. The more time passes, the more likely it is the project gets derailed, in my estimation.

It would be interesting to discuss potential outcomes, however. SAFIRE could go the way of the electric car--i.e. being bought out and buried (literally, in the case of the cars!). Or it could be sabotaged. It could be banned as a technology too dangerous to allow in the public arena. It could fizzle or be stopped in so many ways. My biggest fear is not that the science isn't real but that the project will be infiltrated or dragged out for decades like Brilliant Light Power.

Quote from Dr Richard

It al looks really convincing-what is missing is publication of their data in some rigorous scientific journal to really put such low temperature plasma fusion on the map so again mainstream physicists would take notice and money would flow into the project that is being wasted on ITER.

I understand the sentiment and it makes sense from a scientist's view. As a businessman, however, I disagree on this course. If SAFIRE really has something here, and the project is being funded (or overfunded--"oversubscribed" is the term the team used in reference to investor interest), what incentive is there to bang your head against the giant immovable wall that is academia? Why fight tooth and nail, getting rejection after rejection from mainstream journals, just to get published? Does SAFIRE really need the blessing of a group of scientists who so strongly believe "hot fusion" is the holy grail that they're willing to stand by and watch tens of billions get dumped into the ITER money pit? The only way these people come-to-Jesus is if they see a reactor in action. Even then they might not believe it. Who is SAFIRE trying to convince and/or compel by spending precious tens or hundreds of hours writing a paper instead of devoting every available resource to building a commercial reactor?

I say build the device and let the chips fall where they may. But waiting around for mainstream science to give SAFIRE its blessing would be a colossal mistake, in my opinion.

Quote from Alan Smith

And in the small print about the Aureon team is another person as significant as Hal Puthoff, one Eric Davis. ED has a long history of working on black projects, and was at one time working on Ken Shoulder's replications for the USAF.

Yes, Puthoff's and Davis' involvement in SAFIRE is curious. While it provides fodder for skeptics to dismiss the entire effort, it also suggests SAFIRE itself might be a type of "disclosure" akin to the To The Stars Academy (TTSA) project, which professes to be an organization designed to bring about acknowledgment of UFOs as a non-trivial phenomenon. Coincidentally (or not), Puthoff and Tom DeLonge are co-founders of TTSA.

Puthoff is the perfect advisor for a "time release aspirin" type of disclosure. He's spent 50 years walking the thin line between military and industry players. He has ties to Stanford, GE, the NSA, the DoD and NASA. He's also been involved with some dubious ventures and questionable personalities (Scientology, Project SERPO, Uri Geller, etc.)--guaranteeing easy dismissal by skeptics while retaining plausible deniability for government entities who may already have SAFIRE technology, or something even more exotic. Puthoff's background as a legit scientist can't be completely ignored--especially when it comes to alternative energy production. His presence may indicate that SAFIRE is the one project that will be allowed to emerge, even if in a highly managed way.

Even though TTSA is, in my opinion, a front for the intelligence apparatus (willingly or not), it can't be denied that DeLonge and Puthoff's group has managed to thrust the UFO subject into the limelight, where it has remained for a shockingly long time thanks to the recently released Pentagon videos of the "tic tac" UFOs. Will Puthoff's involvement in SAFIRE ultimately result in similar sustained mainstream attention? Or is he there to make sure it never succeeds? Depends on who he's really working for, I guess.

Quote from JedRothwell

Credentials mean nothing if you don't do your homework. Scientists who have not read the literature are not qualified to discuss an experiment. Any experiment, ever.

I have seen many idiotic comments about cold fusion made by distinguished scientists, including some Nobel laureates. These were brilliant people, but they knew nothing about the experiments. I am not exaggerating; I mean they did not know what instruments were used, what results were obtained, or how the results were interpreted. They were talking about an imaginary version of the experiment. No matter how smart you may be, you cannot do science by ESP.

What I find so grating is that skeptics just assume they would know if there was anything valid in said experiments. As if by osmosis the truth seeps into their brains with them having to do the dirty work of becoming familiar with the actual research. And if we had a dollar for every time a skeptic has uttered the phrase, "I have not seen any evidence to support [insert heretical model here]!", well, we'd not be hurting for funding.

If you don't look at any evidence, you will surely not see any.

By the way, I looked through all my Aureon documentation and there's nothing resembling a non-disclosure agreement. I presume this is because the team does not intend to discuss sensitive details in communications with anyone but the largest investors.

Quote from Rob Woudenberg

That is not the point. This has to do with integrity.
This was indicated as quote from an e-mail that was sent to a restricted group of people. E-mails are not default public matter.

It was indicated in the email that the information I quoted was going to be released publicly in the YouTube video. There was no demand or request to withhold that information for any period of time, nor were there any specific details on the subject I mentioned. Perhaps if I leave out the quotes and paraphrase next time?

Regarding "Professor" Dave, he is a high school teacher and YouTube star wannabe. If he wasn't such a vitriolic a-hole, nobody would know or care who he was. But sensationalism and "Jerry Springer" bravado sells on the internet, so let him have his little cult of followers as long as he doesn't cause any real harm to actual researchers' projects.

Quote from Curbina

The fact is that even water vapor can carry current in vast amounts, hence our dynamic atmosphere, with plenty of water vapor in it, can be considered a plasma from this point of view, and this has many practical implications, and this is something some of the more hated proposers of the EU mantain, and receive a lot of flak for it.

The Article linked by Alan Smith is worded in a very careful way, I bolded the more relevant snips, and due to this, I am really tempted to go paste the paragraph and link in the Professor Dave comments section, just to see how irate he reacts...

Yes, I have drafted many an open letter to pseudo-skeptics like the good Prof Dave, with hopes of someday releasing them in all their scathing glory--when and if a working device exists with results beyond question. But we can't get hung up on the I-told-you-so's. When that day comes, we may or may not feel the desire to rub it in the disbelievers' faces. I think the look on their mugs as their paradigms come crashing down around them with be therapy enough. (But I'm keeping the letters just in case.)

Aureon did send an email to shareholders just today. There's one paragraph that makes me giddy (while reserving final judgment on the claim's validity, of course):

Quote

The [recent SAFIRE experimental] results went far beyond our expectations, we knew we could repeat the results we got before, and we did. SAFIRE is transmuting elements, lots of elements.

But even more astonishing is that the nuclear reactions are not only occurring on the surface and in the atmosphere, they are occurring all throughout the metal alloy core. Give that some thought for a moment and the implications when it comes to remediation of nuclear waste and what it means when we discuss optimizing the fuel.

What we're talking about is modern day alchemy. If Aureon can figure out how to transmute at will, it's a world game-changer. It also means the end of the multi-billion dollar waste of time and space called ITER. Good riddance.

There is a 30 year history of transmutations, if on a tiny scale, in "cold fusion" experiments. So SAFIRE's claims are not out of the blue. They may just be the ones who've figured out how to transmute on purpose and with predictability. Let's hope.

Quote from Alan Smith

https://scitechdaily.com/unexp…-drives-the-sun-to-earth/

Electric current is everywhere, from powering homes to controlling the plasma that fuels fusion reactions to possibly giving rise to vast cosmic magnetic fields.

Though it won't come as fast as many of us would hope, this is clearly the beginning of a trend that will validate the Electric Universe proponents' main contention: that electricity is as important, or more important, than gravity as a driver of cosmological phenomena.

EU contends that only relatively recently acknowledged vast cosmic magnetic fields are by necessity driven by electric current, an idea that mainstream cosmology has resisted. But the above admission reveals the handwriting on the wall. Science will soon need to deal with this reality, and adjust their models accordingly. And there will be a lot of adjusting!

Great find on the article, Alan.

Quote from Shane D.

Well, BLP may disagree, but as far as we are all concerned...may the best man win. With Mizuno, NASA/GEC, BEC, the old guard still plugging away, you and Mills, in the line up, we may have a real race to the finish line. Just heard from our BLP guy today in fact, and he was very up-beat.

But, as you said, we have been there/done that, yet for various reasons it never happened. This time may be different.

Oh man, I really hope so. The patience of the BLP's investors strains credulity. I mean, don't they have tens of millions invested? And yet it's just a dribble here or there in the form of a one-minute video showing boiling water around one of these devices. I believe they are doing what they say they're doing. It's just taking forever. I really think Aureon might beat BLP to the punch. Hopefully there's enough room in the space for both to succeed in dramatic fashion.

Goodness knows the world could use a positive development right about now.

Quote from Shane D.

Thanks for the disclosure. Hate to pry, but am curious...how long have you been following LENR?

Pry all you want! I have followed *almost* since the beginning. The beginning of the modern era at least (Pons & Fleischmann's 1989 announcement). Back to the Eugene Mallove years, when the journal "Infinite Energy" (now at 150+ issues) was named, simply, "Cold Fusion". At least I think that's what it was called on its first issue.

Anyone traveling along that same route will remember a series of CF hopefuls: Patterson's "beads"; The Cincinnati Group's nuclear remediation claims (featured on "Good Morning America"); sonoluminescence breakthroughs (and subsequent dismissals); Steorn; Rossi's E-Cat; Blacklight Power (now Mills' Brilliant Light Power); and now SAFIRE/Aureon.

It appears to me that Aureon has taken the lessons of past failures and approached their device in a way designed to maximize chances of commercialization. I don't know of any other "alt energy" group that has gone to the extent Aureon has to secure funding and make strategic alliances in such an open fashion.

Naturally, I could be proven wrong on all of this optimistic thought. However, Aureon looks to me to be worth the gamble.

Quote from JedRothwell

Read the history of cold fusion and you will see. Especially Beaudette's book.

Greed has not been triggered because investors do not realize cold fusion is real. They don't realize that because many prominent scientists, the DoE, Scientific American, Nature magazine and others have said it is not real. When an investor asks a scientist, or does a Google background check, he sees that cold fusion is fraud. The scientist, unfortunately, knows nothing and has read nothing, but he assumes that Nature is telling the truth -- because it is usually a reliable source of information.

The situation is similar to where the airplane was before the 1908 demonstrations. There were no investments in aviation because the Scientific American and other opinion leaders said heavier than air aviation did not exist, and the Wright brothers were "liars, not flyers."

If it became generally known that cold fusion is real, I am sure greed would overcome the academic politics immediately, as you suggest.

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Spot on, Jed. I highly recommend Beaudette's book too.

All the peer reviewed articles in the world won't bring about the change we're looking for as much as a working device would. Build it and they will come.

Nobody should worry about whether investors will come on board: greed will fill the void as surely as nature abhors a vacuum.

In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I am an investor in Aureon, and have every incentive to see the SAFIRE team succeed. I'm not nearly as concerned about publications as I am about engineering hurdles.

Quote from Navid

I don't think one's principles should be determined by what skeptics say or do. "Just build" a device sounds good in theory, but most startups are there to prove a thesis and get backers - not to commercialize at industrial scale. That is what happens in all venture industries. M&A is more important for this area than IPO.

I admire Mills for his intense work ethic and showing that you can publish mainstream science whilst doing commercial R&D. I am sure he never in a million years expected that even with that, few physicists would not look at his data seriously. Still, you don't do what's right because of the whims of others.

I also think publishing science helps bring other important backers on board - who may otherwise not show up - be it granting agencies, angel investors, and other scientists.

Changing the world isn't easy, and we should always respect those willing to engage in the "Impossible" - it literally goes against all of our cultural / survival programming.

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Publishing is all well and good, but the process is sloooooooow. It's slow even when you don't have an entire community biased against your claims from the get-go. When you have all the major journals barring at the door anything smacking of "cold fusion," it could take an eternity to push something through. Is it a good use of SAFIRE's time to pursue that avenue in hopes of convincing some scientific minded angel investor, or advisor to a potential investor, to hop on board? Probably not.

I admire Mills' attention to detail too, but at Brilliant Light's current pace, they are unlikely to beat SAFIRE to commercialization--and Mills has a couple decades' head start. I argue that most investors don't care much about why a device works, just that it works. There is a relative handful of people who even understand Mills' model, and they are not likely to be the ones investing.

Quote from Bruce__H

It isn't vague. If you make claims then you publish in sufficient detail that people cam replicate (or not) your results.

The problem is that the recent history of LENR is that this is also a route self delusion and fraud.

I think it is a vague demand. What is SAFIRE going to publish? How to make an artificial sun? And who's going to try to replicate that? Do you think that just because SAFIRE spends a year trying to placate dis-believers in the EU by publishing something somewhere, that skeptics are going to suddenly embrace the project? It seems to me that it's an utter waste of time to publish for the goal of earning support of the scientific community, the vast majority of which scoffs at the very idea and would ignore not just one but dozens of potential papers if they existed.

I would argue that the edifice upon which "big bang" cosmology is constructed is itself the biggest exercise in self-delusion and fraud in the history of science. The mistakes CF researchers have made, toiling away on their own time with virtually no funding, pales by comparison.

But this is beside the point. Pseudo-skeptics like "Professor" Dave will always move the goalposts, no matter which hoops the target of his denigration jumps through. So screw him. You don't need his approval or the blessing of a largely oblivious community of non-believing scientists. Just build a damn device and let nature takes its course.

Quote from Bruce__H

For me, there are 2 good points that "Professor" Dave made in his video. Neither has anything to do with the Electric Universe as such. First, Dave mentions that SAFIRE has no publications regarding its most distinctive claims. I believe that everyone here agrees with this although some think it doesn't matter. Dave thinks it is a problem and I agree. Second is Lowell Morgan's comment about the SAFIRE team ..."Monty and others are making fraudulent statements about their measurements". That isn't a thinly veiled insult, or an appeal to ridicule, nor does it require any prior belief level regarding the Electric Universe. It sounds to me like Morgan has something specific in mind. I see people trying to sweep it under the rug here and that is not the right way to proceed..

If publications are important, the Prof and others need to define what that means. Is one publication enough to support SAFIRE's claims? Two? Ten? And in which journals? Merely insisting that someone needs to publish something about something somewhere is vague and plays exactly into the hands of pseudo-skepticism. The goalposts can always be moved once SAFIRE achieves whatever vague goal detractors claim needs to happen before they can be taken seriously.

A profitable and useful venture requires three things: a working device, patent protection and a lot of funding. It doesn't require the approval of the scientific community. So I still argue that SAFIRE is taking a legitimate route to success. There are alternate routes, but none as direct as the one they're taking, as far as I can see.

If Morgan has a specific criticism in mind, he should lay it out in detail. Otherwise it's just the noise of a disgruntled former employee. It will be swept under the rug until it carries the weight of specificity.

Naturally, "Professor" Dave doesn't care about supporting evidence for Morgan's claims. As long as the narrative falls into Dave's set of assumptions, he's going to run with it.

Quote from Shane D.

IMO, this is 2 issues; what Lowell said in the video, and what Prof Dave has said afterwards. I thought what Lowell had to say was much too personal. Especially so considering it was said publicly, and it was directed at his former Safire team members. That old saying "praise in public, criticize in private" comes to mind.

Had he stuck to the science, that would have been fine as that is what science is all about. But he went beyond that and made it personal with insults that called into question the professionalism, and integrity of his old friends. No need for that.

Anyone who has worked in, or headed up a team, knows that personality clashes are par for the course. That is as true in business, as in science. It is the nature of the beast when you bring people together to accomplish a task. Some people though, just do not work well with others, and that seems to be the case here.

What this Prof Dave has had to say since the video, in response to the criticisms, is not making matters any better. He comes across as petulant, and because he has backed himself into a corner by saying some regretful things, and resorting to censoring to give himself the edge, he seems to think his way out is to be more insulting, and petulant.

The Aureon Energy group has decided to do the right thing...take the high road. They will not get in a public spat with a bitter former colleague. And contrary to the ad hominems in the video, they are a very well qualified team, and have only good intent. They are all well up in the years, and each without a blemish to their credentials....that alone tells you what you need to know about their integrity. Their high level of science/engineering speaks for itself.

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If you parse what Lowell says, you'll find nothing specific regarding the rest of the Safire team's alleged errors. Lowell's letter is merely thinly veiled insults and the tried-and-true logical fallacy of appeal to ridicule (or ab absurdo). In other words, it uses phrases such as "planets bouncing around like billiard balls" to attempt negate Safire's true scientific pursuits. It relies on the reader already believing that the EU is absurd on its face.

No wonder Prof Dave included it: it's exactly how he seeks to debunk. This is how pseudo-skeptics operate.

A real skeptic ignores the most "fringe-y" aspects of a model and focuses on the hardest-to-disprove aspects. Lowell's lengthy career in plasma physics was likely a hindrance to Safire's progress. Because, after all, if you've become an expert in the field throughout the "big bang" era, which insists plasma has virtually no role in cosmology, you're probably going to find yourself saying "but that's impossible" more than you're going to be uttering, "hey, you may have something there!"

Quote from sam12

Professor Dave gets debunked.

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Hadn't seen that video yet. Thank goodness somebody did it. Sadly, though, "Professor" Dave's followers are highly unlikely to watch it.

Quote from Bruce__H

As a sanity check here ... I hope everyone realizes that many of the most prominent players on this forum sound to outsiders like Dr Dave sounds to you.

I'm not sure what this post means. Dr. Dave is a condescending jerk who quickly gets down in the mud and has no problem slinging it in every direction. Every time I read one of his comments starting with "Hate to break it to you, champ," I can't help but feel for those students who've been unlucky enough to have this pretentious a-hole in their classroom.

Are there people here who resort to profanity five words into their retort? Maybe. But this is a forum, not a public YouTube page that professes to be, um, professorial. I can tell you that every person who applies to our business gets the Facebook/YouTube/Instagram litmus test before we even consider them for a position.

I hope every time Prof Dave applies for a substitute teacher job, his prospective employer takes a look at how quickly he degenerates into vitriol on his public page. Imagine how vile he must be in private life.

Regarding publication, I think it's a red herring. As a keen observer of the "cold fusion" saga that has played out over 30 years, it's become quite obvious skeptics will not accept data that so clearly undermines their models unless a working device is placed before their very eyes. When you have people like the non-scientist James "The Amazing" Randi running around saying everything is a parlor trick, even a working device might be ignored by the likes of Professor Dave. Those guys would rather assume they're being duped than be forced to accept that their own models are bunk--or at least have gaping holes in them.

First off, big mainstream journals like Nature will not touch cold fusion or excess energy claims. It's policy. It doesn't matter what the data shows. The subject is forbidden; it's barred at the door. So skeptics screaming "where are the papers?!" are impossible to satisfy. If publication in a "lesser" journal occurs, skeptics brush it off as "just one obscure journal." If it's two papers, or ten papers, in journals that are not acceptable, it doesn't matter to them. If something sneaks into a "real journal," skeptics still ignore it, claiming the journal had a moment of weakness, or it was politically motivated, or the journal is lowering its standards. There are a million excuses even when a company does it exactly the way skeptics insist.

So, no, Aureon should not waste their time publishing to satisfy the so-called scientific community. They should do it how they're doing it right now: focus on building a prototype that can be commercialized as fast as possible, as well as building alliances with companies and agencies that are more interested in making money or solving energy crises than proving theory.

Brilliant Light Power, in my opinion, has been too obsessed with publishing their theories. Everybody wants to know *why* something works, but for god's sake, the reality is that we don't know how *most* things work. We have no clue what gravity is, for instance, yet that hasn't stopped inventors from using it to make useful machines.

I've gotten into it with "Professor Dave" on YouTube. His EU video is friendly and cute, but it is a hit piece, pure and simple. The guy in real life, however, is neither friendly nor cute. He is vile. Check out his YouTube comments section to see his litany of condescending, vulgar responses to anyone questioning his limitless knowledge. He's a high school science teacher, for god's sake. Hardly a pedestal high enough to rain down insults on those who don't believe in his special brand of unfalsifiable and undetectable magic (i.e. black holes, dark matter, big bangs, Oort clouds).

Dave's debunking video basically comes down to this: EU guys think electricity is more important than gravity, but gravity is all we see in the universe (or think we see), so they're crazy.