The E-Cat is back, and people are still falling for it!

No argument on this one. Complete scam.

Do you want to know what else is a scam, and fits nicely in your definition of pseudoscience?

Satan.

If I recall, "cold" fusion actually is possible. If one the electrons in an H2 molecule is replaced with a muon, the two nuclei have a chance of getting close enough to fuse. I believe "cold" is on the order of 1000 K and there is a small issue of creating muons which requires as much energy as one gets out of the subsequent idealized reactions. If the E-Cat folks ever manage to sell stock, put me down for a short position.

@Rick (#2): You're thinking of muon-catalyzed fusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion) which is a well-understood, and theoretically predicted physical process. Exactly as you described, a muonic hydrogen molecule (or a muonic d-t molecule) is such that the two nuclei's wavefunctions can overlap strongly, as their separation is reduced by m(e)/m(mu) = 1/207. The typical ~100 pm separation is reduced to 500 fm or so, compared to the nuclear diameter of ~1 fm. They're not "touching," but any means, but they are close enough together that nuclear interactions become less improbably.

An interesting note is that this process is generally *really cold* fusion! According to the Wikipedia article (and cited sources), the typical process involves using a block of frozen hydrogen as a muon beam dump; the catalyzed fusion occurs at a few kelvins. Makes the Pons-Fleishmann "process" downright _hot_ by comparison :-)

The cold fusion effects that have been detected by various laboratories to date appear to be interesting but the energy production is far too trivial to come anywhere near breaking even and there is little, if any,prospect of that happening.

Luckily, the cold fusion boondoggle has not come close to wasting as much money and resources as the greatest of all scientific boondoggles. That of hot fusion research.

The promise of hot fusion has always been and ever shall remain fifty years in the future. To date, $100 M down the drain, and counting.

You "forgot" to address the 2nd test.

Funny to see how hard it is to swallow the bird.

You should move to 9/11 conspiracy.
LENr works. it is the 3rd repor on the 3rd reactor.

previously pathoskeptics aske for that kind of experiment, criticizing flow calorimetry, or static calorimetry, or any calorimetry, or ... or ...

stop playing the fool please.
It is not yet fully industrial (in normal innovation it take 5 years),

Mayne hypothesis you claim are answered by the paper...
or you can just claim all the team is fraudster, and ther is no way, no way you may be wrong.

continue to ask impossible things, like device that are not yet engineered, leaking of trade secrets,...

if you want open science, just read the paper..
and don't ask them to be published in journal that have an official policy to forbide any LENr paper...
to easy to be right....

just read the ICCF15 paper of ENEA on cistallography and LENR... read the tritium papers... read the Heat/He4 papers... read the CEA Grenoble calorimetry...
read.

and please don't say that if believers of LENr study on a subject it is manipulation...

anyone working on LENR, except few illuminated like Cudes, is convinced quickly.
papers are clear, and experuments are clear.

guess why next cold fusion conference will happen in Uni Missouri.
It is because Robert Duncan, boss at Uni missouri Physics dept, was hired by CNBC 60minutes to debunk the work of Energetics Technologies...
how studied tha facts and get convinced. UniMissou even bough the technology of Energetics (too long term for that startup, especially with the competition around, Defkalion, Rossi, Brillouin, Celani, piantelli).

in january the situation was like that:
http://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/

now Defkalio said they will make a demo of hyperion at Niweek, a paper at ICCF18.
rossi have it's report.
LENR-Cities starts partenrships with kresse and lenr-invest...

it is business.
Old-industry executives start to hear LENR innovators, provided all is not published...

It is normal story in science.
Anomalies in the current scientific theory are never accepted, as Thomas Kuhn explains.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb even explain that it is garage inventor who make the real invention, yet history is rewritten afterward to give paternity to standard science, which in fact oppose until business fund research.

it would be funny if it was not sad.

I pray that it is true, The people selected to do the tests and their institutions are very well respected but I must admit they are not trained to pick up scams. If it were almost anyone but Rossi I would cut far more slack but with his track record I think the highest level of scrutiny is required. I am still hoping it is all true.

Slam!

Just for fun, can you say a few words about religion? :)

For this test, Rossi disallowed the examination of either the reactants or the products, claiming that it would reveal his secret catalyst.

From what little contact I have had with the corporate world, I know of these things called nondisclosure agreements, which basically say you agree not to reveal any trade secrets. Rossi either has never heard of this option or believes that he doesn't have the resources to enforce an NDA. (If the latter, he might even be right.) But this is a huge red flag. The only way to demonstrate that the fusion reaction you claim is happening is in fact happening is to examine the contents of the sample before and after. The other three methods would demonstrate that something is happening, but not necessarily the reaction you claim is happening. Of course it's a bad sign that the other three methods for verifying that something is happening have been ruled out as well.

I don't see how it would be possible to regulate the supposed reaction using the electrical heater as claimed: "Once operating temperature is reached, it is possible to control the reaction by regulating the power to the coils."

The reaction itself is supposed to generate (much) more heat than the electrical heater. So how could the reaction stop when you turn the heater off? I have discussed this elsewhere and there are some very far-fetched possibilities but basically in any "simple" case we would not expect this. And the authors of this "investigation" certainly have not produced any explanation.

It also seems to me that the discussion on 25-26 reveals that the authors have no idea what they are doing. They are here comparing a graph of the measured surface temperature of the device with the heating of an idealised theoretical resistor. The curves don't look the same and the authors draw conclusions from this. Really?!

@ Michael Kelsey

How's the hot fusion working for you?

In reading the report it is clear the investigators ran two experiments side by side. One with and one without the secret ingredients. The reactor without produced no excess heat. How does one explain that?

Also Prof. Hagelstein and Swartz at MIT demonstrated excess heat from a device last year. Are they scam artists as well?

Scientific American claimed heavier than air flight to be impossible years after the Wright brothers demonstrated otherwise.

Imagine for a moment that Rossi's device is real. The guys that have been doing hot fusion would have to pack up and move on. Can't have that of course. They have kids in college and mortgages to pay.

Aye, you can get cold fusion from an ordinary household lemon! Put two electrodes, and you get the power out from the "secret catalytic properties" of lemons!

Its true!

I can't tell you the secret of the electrode's construction, though, since I cannot afford to enforce an NDA...

"One with and one without the secret ingredients. The reactor without produced no excess heat. How does one explain that?"

Heh, my secret lemon cold fusion was written before that question.

However, it quite nicely answers that.

With different electrode manufacture, there is no power from a lemon. With my secret versions, you do! How do you explain that?

COLD FUSION!

Mannstein: No, they did not do this at all. They (later, not side by side) ran a completely different experiment without the "secret ingredient". There is absolutely no data included in the report that makes it possible to compare these experiments in any relevant sense. There is nothing indicated in the report that the authors did any meaningful comparison, either.

Yes, such a comparison would have been *great*. It's a shame that it was not done.

Some of you commenting here, particularly those of you who are new, seem to be missing a very important point, one that I tried to make in my article. Maybe I need to be more concise.

In science, you do X in your experiment, you see/observer/measure Y, and then based on X and Y, you conclude Z.

Based on this paper, X is totally unacceptable. Regardless of what they say for Y and Z, it's not worth listening to, because of the unacceptable quality of X. And no test or experiment that has an unsound X should be trusted.

Do a good experiment -- a good X -- and then let's see what we've got. Until then, be skeptical.

Mannstein: Hagelstein and Swartz have a completely different setup that has absolutely no relation to Rossi's machine. This is like saying that some guy in China saw a dragon and some other guy in the USA saw Bigfoot, therefore dragons must be real.

Andrea Rossi aside, with all the different companies that claim to have excess heat, all of the money that is going into this field, the hundreds of papers that have been written, all of the Phd's that are putting their reputations on the line for LENR research...

Which is more plausible? That every single one of these people is measuring heat wrong or that they are all part of this great scheme to scam people out of investment money? Or that is this is a real phenomenon that is actually being replicated?

Considering that this technology could literally save the world, and considering your influence in scientific circles all you have to say is... "The onus is on them."

You are obviously aware of what is going on. You admit that it could be possible. Do you feel ANY moral obligation to say, "hmmm, maybe we as a society should look into this?"

You point out the differences of pseudo science and real science. I point you to the symptoms of groupthink.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink#Symptoms

I'm not a scientist, just someone who likes to read about it but even I was able to see how lacking this experiment was. The part about leaving the device plugged in should be an immediate red flag to anyone!

Also, could someone tell me the name of that restaurant with all the funny shit hanging on the walls?

"In reading the report it is clear the investigators ran two experiments side by side. One with and one without the secret ingredients. The reactor without produced no excess heat. How does one explain that? "

If you can't propose a simple non-fusion explanation yourself, then you may be prone to falling for scams.

This is like when the street hustler agrees to play the shell game with you for free a few times. You win at the expected 1/3rd rate and conclude the game is on the up-and-up. Then when you play for money, you always lose. Obviously magic must be involved.

"No argument on this one. Complete scam.

Do you want to know what else is a scam, and fits nicely in your definition of pseudoscience?

Satan."

@Denier
Well crap. It was my running assumption that Satan WAS the secret catalyst in these tests.

Now why would anyone belong to a religion that had a Satan as a deity anyhow? Imagine meeting a person who was so involved in killing demons in their first-person-shooter game that they thought those demons were stalking them in real life. Same difference.

(sorry - off topic)

"Imagine for a moment that Rossi’s device is real. The guys that have been doing hot fusion would have to pack up and move on. Can’t have that of course. They have kids in college and mortgages to pay."

And you imagine they are preventing Rossi from allowing one of the several simple and straightforward tests that would definitively prove that there is something to his machine, causing him to get ALL the money and make the grants those hot fusion researches get look like the chump change that it is... how exactly?

Do they trot their children out in front of him to make big weepy puppy dog eyes, and Rossi is so touched he deliberately uses a shoddy, unconvincing test, ensuring nobody (who matters) takes him seriously?

Or could it be that Rossi knows how his machine works, and it ain't fusion, and therefore he will never allow a test which could demonstrate that?

When your conspiracy theory requires the victim to be in on it then maybe it's time to remove your tinfoil hat (they actually amplify the government mind control rays, you know).

If Rossi were asking for money from you, then you would have a right to know what you are paying for, but he isn't so you don't. Instead, he goes on developing. On the other hand, even when we know what we are paying for (ITER, Uranium reactors, Nuclear Bombs), we don't always have a right to know how they work and or what the parts are. I don't think I would feel safe giving a Hydrogen bomb to a terrorist just because he had signed a Non Disclosure Agreement and a Promise not to use it for his own ends... So, annoyed as many must be that they can't now just go out and copy Rossi's invention, I can fully understand why he doesn't want to hand over the blue prints, even with Non Disclosure Agreements and Promises in place. Indeed, with his previous experience from authorities who first said his waste oil scheme was OK and then changed the law and turned on him, it is little wonder he has trust in paper agreements. After all, with such as the e-cat, it would be very easy for a "powerful interest" to turn around and grab it away from him, producing documents showing "they" had invented it somehow "sometime" before. At least from a business perspective, what Rossi is doing is entirely rational. As a man who has it "all to lose", it only makes sense to hang on to his knowledge. If attempting a deception, in the other hand, then his approach makes no sense - why not just "sell up and move on". Hanging in there makes no sense if deception is the aim. So, while it is easy to make claims of invisible wires and invisible waves (and invisible men?), it really does not make much sense to do so, especially as there is now a six month trial coming up. What is to be gained? No-one is saying that we should now abandon all research everywhere just because of the e-Cat. Instead, the rational approach is now to start making plans for the event that this does pan out the way that is expected in the next few years. After all, it can be no worse than spending billions on uranium reactors, ITER and other "mainstream" ideas...

If Rossi were asking for money from you, then you would have a right to know what you are paying for, but he isn’t so you don’t. Instead, he goes on developing. On the other hand, even when we know what we are paying for (ITER, Uranium reactors, Nuclear Bombs), we don’t always have a right to know how they work and or what the parts are. I don’t think I would feel safe giving a Hydrogen bomb to a terrorist just because he had signed a Non Disclosure Agreement and a Promise not to use it for his own ends… So, annoyed as many must be that they can’t now just go out and copy Rossi’s invention, I can fully understand why he doesn’t want to hand over the blue prints, even with Non Disclosure Agreements and Promises in place. Indeed, with his previous experience from authorities who first said his waste oil scheme was OK and then changed the law and turned on him, it is little wonder he has no trust in paper agreements. After all, with such as the e-cat, it would be very easy for a “powerful interest” to turn around and grab it away from him, producing documents showing “they” had invented it somehow “sometime” before. At least from a business perspective, what Rossi is doing is entirely rational. As a man who has it “all to lose”, it only makes sense to hang on to his knowledge. If attempting a deception, on the other hand, then his approach makes no sense – why not just “sell up and move on”. Hanging in there makes no sense if deception is the aim. So, while it is easy to make claims of invisible wires and invisible waves (and invisible men?), it really does not make much sense to do so in this case, especially as there is now a six month trial coming up. What is to be gained? No-one is saying that we should now abandon all research everywhere just because of the e-Cat. Instead, the rational approach is now to start making plans for the event that this does pan out the way that is expected in the next few years. After all, it can be no worse than spending billions on uranium reactors, ITER and other “mainstream” ideas of the past… (corrected version)

Cold fusion is possible, if you have a muon source. That has been recognized since 1950. No one knows how to create the muons near enough to the fuel though.

And the hot fusion research budget is chump change. The U.S. has spent less than $30 billion (inflation adjusted) over nearly 60 years. We spent more than five times that much just to take the piss out of the Soviets with chemical rockets. But we can't afford to spend that much spread out over six times the duration on a revolutionary energy technology that would benefit us and the world tremendously? We have to have another stealth fighter instead?

Hot fusion is a real phenomenon with well-understood mechanisms (that have been used to create actual, measurable fusion, as in we know it works), but there are tremendous engineering challenges getting it to work as power generation. Why that's less appealing to people than an unknown mechanism never before seen in science, yet can be created in a device simpler than your toaster as long as you have the magic "catalyst", is beyond... well, no, it's not beyond me. It's quite within my reach to see why people prefer the romantic and super-cheap view rather than the rigorous, studious, expensive, and tedious hard work version.

Anyway, the reason why hot fusion is always 50 years off (or 30, or 20, but always the same number) is because those estimates are based on a given design cycle which requires a given funding level. Funding which has never been given. So big shock, it isn't done in the estimated time. Nevertheless, there has been a lot of progress -- actual, highly-scrutinized, rigorous, and measurable progress -- over the years.

"If Rossi were asking for money from you, then you would have a right to know what you are paying for, but he isn’t so you don’t. Instead, he goes on developing."

Well he is asking for money, from investors. And they do have a right to know what they are paying for. Unfortunately they don't appear to have the understanding to ask for the proper evidence and he isn't about to provide it. Instead, he goes on scamming them.

"So, annoyed as many must be that they can’t now just go out and copy Rossi’s invention, I can fully understand why he doesn’t want to hand over the blue prints, "

You don't need blueprints, or the ingredients in his secret sauce, to demonstrate that the device actually works.

If it works.

If it doesn't, then sure protecting proprietary information is a great excuse for failing to allow a conclusive test and stringing along investors with a series of half-baked easily-scammed "tests".

None of Ethan's four proposed tests would require revealing how the device works. They would only require demonstrating that the claimed effect actually occurs. Which is exactly what this test *didn't* do.

" all of the Phd’s that are putting their reputations on the line for LENR research… "

All? How many is that "all" and how significant is that? If there were only three PhDs doing this, those three would still be *all* of them.

So how many are "all" and how mainstream is it?

"well, no, it’s not beyond me. It’s quite within my reach to see why people prefer the romantic and super-cheap view rather than the rigorous, studious, expensive, and tedious hard work version."

I disagree.

People are much more apt to believe that the ultimate solution would come at the ultimate price. I think you prove that point precisely. We're programmed from birth to believe that anything that sounds "too good to be true" is not true. When this cold fusion comes along promising free pollution free energy, it is undoubtedly "too good."

This whole situation is very similar to the western world elite's current obsession with economic austerity. People think that there's a morality play involved. That the common people must atone for past sins of overspending. When the real solution is for governments to just spend more money on infrastructure.

Think about it for a second. We have hundreds of papers written by credible scientists. Transmutations, excess heat. Several companies garnering investment dollars. National Instuments, NASA, SRI, Mitsubishi, SPAWAR, Los Alamos are all investigating this phenomenon.

Now you tell me. Which is more plausible? I huge web like international scam? Or something is happening?!?!?

"So how many are “all” and how mainstream is it?"

Regarding the Phd's you can see the papers here.
lenr-canr dot org

Regarding the mainstream part... It's all underground. Anyone poking their head above water has it promptly bitten off by the likes of the author of this article.

@7:

I pray that it is true

It isn't. As Eric Lung points out, corporations have perfectly good ways to conduct scientific tests and protect their trade secrets, so not subjecting it to independent scientific testing is a huge alarm bell. What breaks the alarm bell here is that they are refusing to do an isotopic test because they did one the last time and it showed the isotopic mixture of the copper in the device could not possibly have come from fusion. So this is not a case of the inventors not knowing to do such a test; its clear that they do know to do it, but they choose not to.

Another alarm bell which is shared by all cold fusion devices is the lack of gammas and other excited nuclear reactants. I don't think non-nuclear types realize just how damning this is. Let me put it in perspective. They attempted to assess fusion output by weighing their device to a precision of 0.1g. Measuring the gammas would have been approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 more sensitive to the detection of fusion. I may be off by an order of magnitude or three but it really doesn't matter: the number of zeros there shoud drive home the point. No serious investigator would choose to measure mass change over emitted photons. This is like one cosmologist saying he's detemined that the universe is contracting, rather than expanding. Other cosmolgists ask: what instrument did you use to measure that? Hubble? Chandra? Planck? Did you use a ground-based one like Keck? And the guy answers: "no, I used my eyeballs." Would you take anyone seriously if they could use the Hubble but instead used their eyeballs for such a momentous discovery? Now think about this: in the visible range, Hubble is only about 1,000 times better than the human eyeball. Which is great, but compared to the contrast between a lowly gamma spectrometer vs. a tenth gram scale, its peanuts.

Andrew Olsen @19:

Which is more plausible? That every single one of these people is measuring heat wrong or that they are all part of this great scheme to scam people out of investment money?

IMO the most plausible explanation is that there are many people measuring heat right but inferring the wrong source of the heat. IMO it is also plausible to assume a very small number of scammers.

Somewhat differently from Ethan, I think there are two fairly indisputable (as in, very hard to fake) indications of a nuclear reaction one could test for: Copper in the right isotopic ratio that one would expect from fusion, and emitted gammas. The inventor did the first, the results came back disconfirming fusion as the source, and so he insisted it not be done again. The inventor has (AFAIK) never allowed the second.

"I think there are two fairly indisputable (as in, very hard to fake) indications of a nuclear reaction one could test for: Copper in the right isotopic ratio that one would expect from fusion, and emitted gammas."

Look. Something is not completely right with established physics... There are no gamma rays. Somehow neutrons are coming together to create 4H with a decay into He.

From the article:

"Well, the short of it is, it got very hot and stayed very hot — about three-to-seven times hotter than you’d expect based on 360 W of continuous power — for the entire time that it ran."

EXACTLY what is meant by "three-to-seven times hotter?"

To my way of thinking, that would have to be three-to-seven times hotter ABSOLUTE, which would be very hot indeed and highly unlikely.

There are lots of ways to screw up a power measurement. They used the PCE - 830 meter, which is a 3 phase AC meter. It is only capable of measuring sinusoidal signals from 45 to 65Hz, which means if the 'secret' waveform was NOT entirely in that range the meter will fail to accurately read out power.

The easiest way to trick it would be to have the AC waveform on top of a DC waveform.

For all the work they did trying to figure out the output power of the thing, they did absolutely nothing to check that the meter they are using is even capable of accurately measuring the input power.

It is also extremely odd to use three-phase AC to power a heater resistor - except to limit the selection of meters to AC meters.

The next major LENR demo will be held at NIWeek by Defkalion Green Technologies.

Defkalion has been lying low, preparing for some big splashes this year and next.

Defkalion is tackling around 20 major applications of their LENR reactor through contracts with several licensees, including some major players. These players include Siemens and Fiat. We may be able to order a Defkalion in our new RAM truck before too long. Price point expected to be around 1/10 of what we presently pay for power. First product expected by second quarter 2014.

National Instruments will sanction this first public reactor demo expected for NI Week in August with the full weight of their corporate credibility. Also supporting this test throughout the scientific community is the highly regarded reputation of the founder of NI, Dr. James Truchard.

Defkalion has been doing it right by keeping things low key. But their LENR theory will be released and explained in July and demonstrated in August.

D Kim from Purdue will explain the theory as currently understood.

Please attend these events and see the device and theory first hand; you owe it to science.

Sorry, my post #36 was imperfect, please allow me to correct and amplify.

The july presentation mention in post #36 is as follows:

ICCF-18 - 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO will be held on July 21-27 2013.

Dr Yeong E. Kim is Group Leader, Purdue Nuclear and Many-Body Theory Group, Director, Center for Sensing Science and Technology (CSST).

Dr Yeong E. Kim will be reading a paper detailing the theory behind LENR at ICCF-18 as understood and researched by Defkalion.

"People are much more apt to believe that the ultimate solution would come at the ultimate price. I think you prove that point precisely. We’re programmed from birth to believe that anything that sounds “too good to be true” is not true. When this cold fusion comes along promising free pollution free energy, it is undoubtedly “too good.”"

Of course. That's why nobody ever buys into get-rich-quick schemes, un-ending market bubbles, or investments with ridiculous rates of return, that ultimately turn out to be true. Wait a minute...

Here's the thing, though: No matter how unlikely I believe that the solution to fusion power is a toaster + pixie dust, all I'm waiting on to be convinced is a scientifically rigorous demonstration that it works.

Whereas you hold out that it is likely, despite yet another completely un-rigorous non-test that proves nothing. When doing it well would be trivial. Intentionally failing to actually subject the instrument to a test, and rather conducting a sham test that could only convince the scientifically illiterate, doesn't raise any alarms for you.

My response is in line with the reality of this test, yours runs counter. So gee maybe it is just my from-birth programming causing me to take the same side as objective reality, but going by the evidence it seems to be working out for me!

Also FYI there's no such thing as a Nigerian Prince.

I'd like to see you Science/Pseudoscience chart applied to Global Warming. Just sayin'

I should have added this reference to my post regarding your first required point as follows:

“Allow a thorough examination of the reactants before the reaction takes place, and another of the products after the reaction, and show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place.”

This point is addressed in this paper.

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS & PERFORMANCE OF THE DEFKALION’S HYPERION PRE-INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/ICCF-17-Hadjichris…

A before and after assay of the element content in a nuclear active area was presented at ICCF-17 showing transmutation.

You will find the assay on page 4 and 5.

Notice that the amount of nickel doubles in the nuclear active environment after the LENR reaction ends.

Rossi would have had to design a world class electric fraud plan to anticipate what equipment was going to be used in the test.

He did not know what the test plan was and could not know if this fraud plan would cover every case and equipment configuration.

As a test plan developer myself, I would be hard put to come up with a fraud plan that was perfect in every possible case, knowing full well if I failed to pull off the scam plan, the scam I had worked so hard to develop would then be all over and exposed.

No, the best solution to the systems design is to insure that the system works. This in itself is very hard to do.

Even in scamming, Kiss is important. I would not first melt down a system as a ploy, which is way too complicated of a scam plan, IMHO.

"Whereas you hold out that it is likely, despite yet another completely un-rigorous non-test that proves nothing. "

No, I hold that it is likely based on 20 years of replications by established physicists. Palladium, Nickel wire, Nickel powder, constantin, in heavy water, in light water, hydrogen. Read the papers! It is simply not plausible to think that these people have all made mistakes measuring heat or are part of some international conspiracy!

What power level is required to get that device to barely enter the visible wavelengths (700nm), again, assuming no losses other than black body let alone melt down at 2000C or more?

Using
http://www.ajdesigner.com/phpwien/wien_equation_t.php at 700nm:

blackbody temperature (T) = 4139.6692857143 kelvin

q=2.40137205*10^-9*pi*(Th^4-Tc^4)

q=2.40137205*10^-9*pi*(2.9367203218388994*10^14-Tc^4) ; subst(4139.6692857143, Th)

q=705199.0585641474*pi

q=2.2154481E6W

Yeah, Rossi had a really high frequency power supply and wall plug pumping even 1/10th of that into the E-Cat HT.

"Rossi would have had to design a world class electric fraud plan to anticipate what equipment was going to be used in the test. "

Controlling your mark's expectations isn't world-class fraud, it's Conning 101.

Step 1: Invite credulous un-skeptical researchers to test your device.
Step 2: Tell credulous un-skeptical researchers that your device runs on AC power.
Step 3: Restrain maniacal laughter when credulous un-skeptical researchers arrive with an AC-only measuring device.
Step 4: Power device with DC current I MEAN FUSION.

The thing is if this test was worth a damn, there would be no need to discuss how likely it is that Rossi could anticipate that the researchers would take him at his word and then exploit the gaping holes in their test procedure.

If the test was worth a damn, it wouldn't matter how good a scammer Rossi was. It would either confirm or refute his claims.

The test did nothing to eliminate obvious and mundane alternative explanations, ergo it means nothing.

And of course no other kind of test will ever be allowed. The intent is not to demonstrate with scientific rigor the truth of his claims. The intent is to string along credulous investors in order to make more money.

@ Andrew: "No, I hold that it is likely based on 20 years of replications by established physicists. "

Which do not claim to be able to make a viable power source out of their reactions, or, indeed, that what they observe are fusion reactions.

This is about Rossi and the E-Cat and this meaningless sham of a "test". Which The New Energy Times site linked before actually calls out as being a shoddy piece of garbage. Or, in their words: "Rossi Manipulates Academics to Create Illusion of Independent Test"

Hmmm. Sounds like maybe you should stop conflating the work of real scientists with obvious scams like E-Cat.

I used to do science demonstrations. In one of them, I would have a student hold a piece of flash paper while I lit it with a match. I told them to let go of it when I lit it.
It would flash, and then there would be NOTHING LEFT. I would ask the student what was the question they were thinking. Invariably, over thousands of demonstrations, the question was: "Where did it go?"
That establishes that they are a scientist. And that is the First, and most basic question of science. In science, you can ask, and track where stuff comes from, and where stuff goes to. And they have to balance EXACTLY. The energy has to balance, the amounts of chemicals have to balance, and in the case of nuclear reactions, the energy/matter types and amounts have to balance. It is the law of conservation, and the basis for all equations of chemistry and physics. That is what makes science, science. Here, we are not being allowed to track where stuff comes from, and where it goes to. Scam.

"Hmmm. Sounds like maybe you should stop conflating the work of real scientists with obvious scams like E-Cat."

Andrea Rossi is a paranoid, eccentric whack job that is ruining the whole field for everyone, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have anything. All he's doing is applying engineering to the work of Piantelli.

My point is that something very real is going on. Something that could save the world. There is a moral imperative to investigate this.

@ axil

You're 3 orders of magnitude above what even this P.O.S. paper claimed. They claimed 2kW power production -- less than what an electric clothes dryer might consume. They also claimed average temperatures around 700K.

They used IR cameras. There is no basis for assuming that the peak emissions were in the visible range.

There is a picture of the meltdown. Figure 1.2 above.

I hate to even discuss cold fusion; because I don't want to encourage the nonsense.

In my opinion, cold fusion is a scientific ponzi scheme that deliberately defrauds investor (e.g. environmental groups, state governments, individuals)l who are duped into thinking they are on the leading age of some new age technology. And the only beneficiaries are the con artist scientists and their con artist companies.

here is an example cold fusion, green bullshit.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/fusion-breakthrough/…

The only cold fusion breakthrough in my opinion is that psuedoscience is moved up the science funding food chain and is stealing science funding dollars from gullible investors.

We all know that Rossi has some personal credibility problems. He has been involved in some dodgy business back in the day. Many important people such as Edison and were scammers. Steve Jobs got his start selling devices to steal from the telephone company. People are complicated and you should not have a one-dimensional view of their worth.

Rossi sold his biofuel company EON for about one million Euro and could have retired comfortably to Miami on that income. This is a matter of public record.

Instead - he reinvests the proceeds of the EON sale into his e-Cat R&D project ! Does that sound like a scammer?

It is preposterous that anyone would claim that he does this sale of a profitable company – and then reinvestment the proceeds to perpetuate as scam, with which to obtain enough capital for “adequate living” when he already had that to begin with. Instead he has to go through the constant reminders of his past legal difficulties, in order to find a solution to one of societies greatest problems?

Get a life! People who blindly suggest scam ought to at least do their homework first and read what is available in the public record before spouting deciding on scam, since there is no plausible motive which would be worth the risk.

People who have worked with Rossi tell me that he works 10 to 14 hours a day. He could have retired comfortably but instead he spends hours a day doing difficult, painstaking and sometimes dangerous experiments in a crowded workshop.

People who know him tell me he is a genius at the workbench. He has the kind of intellect that expresses itself in prototype machinery, not abstract ideas. This in no way denigrates his abilities. Some people express ideas in words and formulas, others by making equipment. I think Edison mainly worked by building actual prototypes. You might also compare Rossi to a great artist such as Rodin.

Independent observers tell me that he really did make dozens of prototype devices for his 1 MW reactor, which he then modified and modified again. I think he scrapped a large number of them at one point, and started over from scratch. This must have cost a fortune.

This is not the profile of a scammer. If the equipment was fake, he could produce it quickly with minimal effort. He would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making prototype equipment which he then trashes. He would make one or two fake, stage-prop prototypes, and he would use them again and again. He would not spend thousands of dollars renting a large workshop, renting a gasoline powered 200 kW generator, or buying a shipping container. You can make a fake energy device much smaller than this, at a tiny fraction of this cost. Putting hundreds of devices inside a shipping container does not enhance your credibility with scientists and investors. On the contrary, most people find that odd.

A scammer would not invite important people from NASA to his lab and then do a demonstration that clearly fails to work. If he has the ability to put on a demonstration that fools people and fools instruments, why wouldn't he use that ability every time, for every audience? The people from NASA are experts, but no more capable than others who saw the equipment when it was working properly. There is no question that in other demonstrations the performance was quite different from the failed demonstration that day.

I cannot prove by logic and common sense that Rossi is not a faker. This sort of thing cannot be demonstrated with rigorous proof, the way an experiment or an equation can be. But everything I know about history, society, confidence men, and my experience with people like Rossi tell me that he is not faking. He does have a powerful reality distortion field. Some gifted people do, especially inventors and entrepreneurs such as Edison and Steve Jobs. I define this as someone who sees things in his imagination more clearly than he sees things in reality, and who has a strange charisma that sometimes causes other people share his visions. Such people are dangerous. They often cause disasters. But they also build things that most people think are impossible, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the airplane.

"apples and oranges" fellows
(Arguments about 'cold fusion' impossible so Rossi a fraud) Rossi is NOT claiming 'cold fusion' - some other nuclear process we are not aware of. Testing just measuring input and output energy. jdh

Andrew @33:

Look. Something is not completely right with established physics… There are no gamma rays. Somehow neutrons are coming together to create 4H with a decay into He.

1. Then reproduce nonemitting nuclear reactions in a lab. Cold fusion research has been going on for 20 years...you can afford to take 2 years off to do some basic science to independently confirm your operating principle.
2. You aren't even discussing the correct reaction.

Nanoplasmonics is a new science. The polariton is just being utilized. In this new science, Bose-Einstein condensation can occur beyond 2000C.

Learn some of this new science before you say LENR is not possible.

A scammer would not allow his fraudulent device to be tested in such a way that it could conclusively and without chance of fraud be shown to work as advertised or to be so much lies and illusions.

A scammer would not allow his device to be tested outside of an environment entirely controlled by them, where such simple things as power supply could be guaranteed to be untampered with and producing exactly as much power as expected.

A scammer would not allow any of this under the guise of "trade secrets" when none of the required controls would expose the supposed secret of the device, because the real secret is not in the device but in the set-up.

I could go on. I could talk about how each of those points don't really speak to Rossi's scammer status. How Madoff was already as rich as a successful head of a brokerage firm when he decided to leverage that into even more money. How "Oops, it failed right when the skeptical experts showed up!" and even "Oops, this time it worked *too* well and melted!" are classic free-energy scam tactics, because the point isn't to trick people with scientific education it's to trick people with more money than sense.

At the end of the day none of that discussion means a damn thing one way or the other. Scammer, misunderstood genius, whatever he may be. There's just one way to tell:

An actual independent investigation that is allowed to properly control for outside interference and once and for all demonstrate to rigorous scientific standards if the device produces excess energy and in what amounts.

That would make me, and many other skeptics, take this seriously. For everyone to take it seriously, and seriously fund him to make his dream of solving one of society's great problems come true. I really want this to be true. But I want to know that it's *actually* true, and that means a real, rigorous test.

That's all it would take.

He won't allow it.

HMMMMM.

I don't want to hear another thing about how he couldn't possibly be a scammer. I want to hear about how his device is going to be tested FOR REAL and then I'll listen.

Ethan you either did not read the whole report very well or decided at some point it wasn't worth reading. None of your points make any sense whatsoever.

First where do they claim Hydrogen + Ni fusion? Last time I checked Rossi et al concluded they were not sure that Ni to Copper is anything more than a secondary and minor effect anymore.

Second they write
"This test enabled us to pinpoint several procedural issues, first of all the fact that the device was
already in operation when the trial began. This prevented us from correctly weighing the device
beforehand, and conducting a thermal analysis of the same without the powder charge, prior to
evaluating its yield with the charge in position. The choice of placing the thermal camera under
the E-Cat HT should also be considered unsatisfactory, as was the impossibility of evaluating the
real emissivity of the cylinder's paint coating.
All these issues were taken notice of in the light of the subsequent test held in March. This was
performed with a device of new design, as a result of technological improvements effected by
Leonardo Corporation in the intervening months."
So it's not clear how you conclude the third test was the same.

Third, have you asked to see all their data? Or does it feel good to just complain that they don't have it all in the 29 page report.

And lastly where do you get the balls to say this was an F of an experiment without clearly reading in detail the 29 page report.

I mean I've found some errors in their calculations because I've gone through them, none that are major, but you just scan the paper, pick out a few phrases and then pretend to know what you are talking about.

Sad dude.

LCD: One minute with a simple geiger counter would put this outrageous scam to rest. Nothing but background clicks means that whatever is going on is conventional energy production. If levels don't change when the machine is turned on, that means they've added a bit of radium for effect. Why all the bizarre glowing resistor crap?

"So it’s not clear how you conclude the third test was the same."

Gee, maybe he actually read the paper and thus knows that they didn't actually address the central issues of the previous test, the ones Ethan mentions and even directly quotes from the description of the March test.

They still didn't actually determine what the total incoming energy was, instead assuming it worked how Rossi said it did and only monitoring with an AC meter clamped externally.

They quote energy densities based on weighing the apparatus before and after with an interim step where Rossi gets the device all to himself.

They completely ignored the most basic concerns, the fundamental question of "Hey is this a hoax or is this legit?"

Oh, but this time they measured the emissivity of the paint! So they can get a more accurate calculation of the effect, never-mind figuring out if the effect is REAL.

Your rebuttal of Ethan's post is like the March test itself: Addressing surface issues while ignoring the fundamental problem and thus failing miserably.

Well CB wouldn't you know it, on page 28 it states

"The March test is to be considered an improvement over the one performed in December, in that
various problems encountered in the first experiment were addressed and solved in the second
one. In the next test experiment which is expected to start in the summer of 2013, and will last about
six months, a long term performance of the E-Cat HT2 will be tested. This test will be crucial for
further attempts to unveil the origin of the heat phenomenon observed so far"

@ Rick where did you get the quaint idea that all nuclear reactions involve radiation that you can detect with a simple geiger counter? The world of nuclear reactions is not the world of two body particle physics.

Rick you need some QM instruction.

The theory of polaritons in LENR explains very well the models that Dr Hagelstein has been developing over many years.

For example, how Boss-Einstein condensation of Spasers, (See polariton condensate), throughout the micro-powder thermalizes the gamma radiation produced by LERN reactions.

Peter Hagelstein: “The big problem is one that has to do with the quantum mechanics issue. The nuclear energy comes in a big energy quantum, and if it didn't get broken up, then the big energy quantum would get expressed as energetic particles, as normally happens in nuclear reactions. So the approach we've taken is that we've said "the only conceivable route for making sense of these observations at all, is that the big energy quanta have to get sliced and diced up into a very very large number if much smaller energy quanta." The much larger number is on the order of several hundred million. In NMR physics and optical physics, people are familiar with breaking up a large quantum into perhaps 30 smaller pieces, you could argue that there are some experiments where you could argue that maybe that numbers as high as 100 or so. It's unprecedented that you could take an MeV quantum and chop it up into bite sized pieces that are 10s of meV.”

Fano resonance is the interference that PH is describing here

Peter Hagelstein: “This model predicts the 30 or 50 fold, or the ability to break up a two level system quantum into, for example, into nearly 30 individual quanta. What we found is the way that the model does it, it can do it, but it's hindered. There's a destructive interference effect that goes on, that makes the effect relatively weak. What we found, is that if you added a weird kind of loss to the model— a loss that you would expect in the cold fusion scenario. The new model, with loss, is much more relevant to the physical situation called fusion than otherwise. But this weird kind of loss, it breaks the destructive interference, and it makes this energy exchange go orders of magnitude faster. And instead of being a relatively weak effect, it's now a very strong, it's a dominant effect. This model is exactly what you need! It's a microscopic engine to take big quanta and chop it up into little tiny quanta. So that's what we've found.”

Thermalization of nuclear energy.

The polariton exists in a state of Quantum Mechanical superposition with the other members of its ensemble in a Nano-cavity.

This is critical for the thermalization of nuclear energy because the polariton will share its energy between all its entangled ensemble members when the nuclear event occurs. This transfer of energy results in decoherence of the entangled states. The nano-cavity will rapidly reinitiate the BEC and the next fusion of a polariton can occur.

Quantum complementarity is the essential feature distinguishing quantum from classical physics.

When two physical observables are complementary, the precise knowledge of one of them makes the other unpredictable. The most known manifestation of this principle is the property of quantum-mechanical entities to behave either as particles or as waves under different experimental conditions. The link between quantum correlations, quantum nonlocality and Bohr’s complementarity principle was established in a series of “which-way” experiments, in which the underlying idea is the same as in Young’s double-slit experiment.

Due to its wave-like nature, a particle can be set up to travel along a quantum superposition of two different paths, resulting in an interference pattern. If however a “which-way” detector is employed to determine the particle’s path, the particle like behavior takes over and an interference pattern is no longer observed.

These experiments have brought evidence that the loss of interference is not necessarily a consequence of the back action of a measurement process. Quantum complementarity is rather an inherent property of a system, enforced by quantum correlations. This manifestation of quantum mechanics enables random nuclear energy distribution for cavity polaritons. Polaritons in micro-cavities are hybrid quasiparticles consisting of a superposition of cavity photons and two-dimensional collective electronic excitations (excitons) in an embedded quantum well. Owing to their mutual Coulomb interaction, pump polaritons generated by a resonant optical excitation can scatter resonantly into pairs of polaritons (signal and idler).

In the low excitation limit, the polariton parametric scattering is a spontaneous process driven by vacuum-field fluctuations whereas, already at moderate excitation intensity, it displays self-stimulation.

In either of these two cases where the nuclear energy goes is directed by the luck of the draw and the randomness of the vacuum energy within the nano-cavity.

Thermalization of fusion energy is all important in LENR because it preserves the structure of the Nuclear active environment. If the energy produced by t nuclear reaction was not moderated it would rapidly destroy the cavities that contained the reaction.

This sometimes happens in LENR where water is present as the source of the dielectric. In this situation, the nuclear energy produced by the reaction destroys the vessel of its creation and a crater erupts in the cathode of the LENR device.

@CB I'm sorry so taking out the internal cylinder that was sealed and under camera surveillance is not good enough for you because I don't recall them doing that on the second test.

Using an overestimate on the weight of the active component so that the energy density is conservatively underestimated reeks of bafoonery right?

At some point you have to respect the wishes of Rossi to have some secrecy and trust the testers or why bother reading any of it at all. Everybody is in on the hoax.

Come on man. If you don't want to call it an independent test then call it a sanity check and be open minded but to categorically deny anything important was just shown is non-sense as well.

It's okay to be skeptical but not stupid. Not everybody is the devil, not everybody is out to fool you.

Clearly after this more proof should be forthcoming and we should expect it but to throw your hands up and say "aha there was a hidden wire" is just childish at this point.

Oh, ha ha, I would know it. I thought that bit was really funny. It's "to be considered an improvement", which I guess is true in a really technical sense. Like a surgeon saying this operation went much better than the last because fewer of the patient's organs fell on the floor before they expired. The rosy-eyed perspective is nice, but it's kinda missing the fundamental point.

So they plan on doing another test. Woo-pee. Are they going to address the issue, or are they seriously going to let it run for six months without verifying that the power supply is what they were told? Gee, that paragraph (and the whole paper) doesn't mention it at all. I wonder what will happen.

What on earth did you think that was supposed to prove?

@CB look if you are okay with the calorimetry and you can follow the approximations of the weight and volume then you can safely conclude this is at the very least 10-20x more "energetic" than say gasoline. So in that sense it's a real phenomenon because Rossi couldn't have used anything else to fake that type of energy output other than the hidden wire trick.

In all the interviews now of the testers they are all claiming they checked for all that and that Rossi left them alone to do what they wanted for the most part.

@CB so you are back on the hidden wire trick. Okay that's your prerogative. I would hope that you follow up with your concerns and ask the testers how they verified they didn't get the wool pulled over their heads. Giuseppe has a linked in account he answers emails so knock yourself out.

The paper states as follows:

“The performance of this device was such that the reactor was destroyed, melting the internal steel cylinder and the surrounding ceramic layers.”

Please explain how you can melt “the surrounding ceramic layers.” at 2000C+ with power from a wall plug without destroying the power carrying abilities of the copper wires that are feeding power to the reactor.

Is this a magic trick?

"At some point you have to respect the wishes of Rossi to have some secrecy and trust the testers or why bother reading any of it at all. "

Yes. That point is AFTER eliminating all possibility of outside interference. He can keep how his black box works a secret. The point is that it must be shown that it WORKS.

"deny anything important was just shown is non-sense as well."

They did literally show things. I'd call "anything important" something justifying their conclusion of excess energy that cannot be explained by conventional sources (e.g. the power plant down the street), and by that standard then no, they did not show anything important.

"It’s okay to be skeptical but not stupid. Not everybody is the devil, not everybody is out to fool you. "

If there's no attempt to fool it would be trivial to show it by having the power source be independently supplied and measured. Not everybody is out to fool, but some are. A properly controlled experiment is how you tell the difference. Stupid is not demanding this before deciding if they're out to fool you or not. Stupid is thinking the results mean something in the absence of this.

@CB I think you need to draw a diagram of where they checked the power. Power measurement was upstream from the blackbox.

@Axil That would be tought but I could possibly do it by sourcing several current sources at once. However that would be pretty obvious since we're talking about ~160KW of power dissipation.

Holy Cow!

I remember reading cold fusion claims on Usenet over 20 years ago. The pattern fits the behavior seen here.

Someone mentions another con-artist demonstrating a "Free-energy" device. Next, true-believers come out of the woodwork insisting "The Man" is repressing the Genius. Then, people patiently point out the flaws in the demonstration and ask isn't a little bit odd no one is allowed to look under the hood? At this point the believers have their hands over their ears, screaming loudly, "La-la-la! I can't hear you!"

Jumping jehoshaphat batman

LENR has made some progress over the last 20 years. In the beginning LENR was producing a few watts of power. Now it is up into the kilowatt range. Soon it will be in the megawatt range.

At some point, the deniers will be screaming loudly, “La-la-la! I can’t hear you!” And I judge very soon.

OK, in three years this will have gone nowhere (because it hasn't anywhere to go) and you'll not mention it at all ever again until the next time this scam resurfaces.

That's my prediction.

What's yours?

"Please explain how you can melt “the surrounding ceramic layers.” at 2000C+"

Please explain how you know this happened. NB: various exothermic compounds will, after a single spark and no more further energy will reach temperatures of 2000C or more.

David #39, it has been applied, by knuckledraggers like yourself.

However, if fails to show fraud to a fantastically high level.

"“So how many are “all” and how mainstream is it?”

Regarding the Phd’s you can see the papers here."

Answer the question.

axil wrote:
"Please explain how you can melt “the surrounding ceramic layers.” at 2000C+ with power from a wall plug without destroying the power carrying abilities of the copper wires that are feeding power to the reactor."

The only reason why you think there is something strange about that is because you are ignorant, and you want to be ignorant. You have not even tried to find out whether this is possible. In fact it is *easily* possible. Electric furnaces can reach a higher temperature *in a controlled fashion* and there is nothing strange about that. Of course, building something that destroys itself is a lot easier and cheaper than something that is actually useful:

http://www.electroglass.com/GAS_Paper.pdf

Hmm, that link was bad. However here is a page that describes how to build home-made electric furnaces with temperatures up to 3000°C:
http://www.metallab.net/kanthal.php

Another good article Ethan. A good analysis, and I'm pleased you didn't tar all cold fusion / LENR with the same brush. There is no such thing as heat at the subatomic level. A "hot" particle is simply one that's moving fast, and when it meets another the result is pressure. If you can exert pressure another way analogous to cold-welding, you've got cold fusion. Ditto if you can contrive en-masse inverse beta decay, though that's more like transmutation. It isn't crackpot pseudoscience to try to solve the world's energy problems. Talking of which, this caught my eye: "Because one of the most important responsibilities that science has to society is to protect it from frauds, hucksters, shysters and con artists who would defraud you out of your money, time, and trust with their cheap trickery and chicanery". Best leave M-theory out of this discussion!

About Picture "Power magic".
It is true, if You use clamp-on Amperemeter to measure AC or DC current, You must have only one wire in "clamp", and no disturbing magnetic fields. To be sure about 3-wire cord, all 3 wires must be checked. If You "clamp on" 2 wires together, with equal current but opposite direction, result is zero.
Clamp on Am-meters are never used for precision measurement. Shunt resistor (low - ohm) connected serial to one of wires (wire must be "broken" for this purpose) must be used, and "voltage drop" measured (I = U/Rshunt).If we have pure sinusoidal current (without DC component), high sensitivity "true RMS" AC voltmeter can be used.If current have not sinusoidal shape, DC or HF component, only oscilloscope connected on shunt resistor can show current shape (or fast analog interface to some kind of computer), and calculation (integration I - time ) performed to know average current or power for some time interval, consumed from AC line. All digital multimeters performed "calculation" internally, it is not real value, except for "true RMS" on pure sinusoidal signal.
Current shunt resistor, must be dedicated for this purpose, low-ohm to avoid heating and change of resistance.
What I see, mr.Rossi use "low cost" digital multimeters and clamp-meters. I dont think, it is scam or not, but there is simple and not expensive method to make very precise measurement of power consumed from AC line.

Even trivial measurement of shunt resistor's themperature would answer all questions of "Secret waveform" affects.

A very nice text on this pseudoscientific campaign, Ethan. Thanks for the positive references. You must be getting tens of thousands of visits because even the people who get to my blog through the rather hidden link are counted in thousands.

Do you believe that the comments mostly supporting this scam reflect the opinions of the society? I actually do. Most people are just stupid and impressionable. They want to protect something – either an Allah or God of a sort or something that replaces It or Him or Her.

@ LCD: You really don't understand what the problem is at all, do you?

The "measured" the power by clamping onto the wire going into the device, using an AC-only ammeter. Two blatantly obvious yet completely ignored problems:

1) The ammeter has to be connected in-line with the power cord so you know exactly how many conductors there are and can measure all of them. Otherwise it's trivial to fool an external ammeter with 2 wires disguised as one. See Ethan's diagram. If the power cord was actually plugged into the ammeter, then this simple deception would not work.

2) The ammeter is incapable of detecting DC currents. Need I say more? Obviously because I already mentioned this, not that I should have even needed to in the first place because you should have thought of this on your own the second you read "AC" -- as should have these "independent investigators".

That's TWO different ways that the test relies on the (unstated) assumption that Mr. Rossi's claims of how the device works can be taken on faith. If we were willing to take his claims on faith we wouldn't need the test in the first place!

They failed to account for the total power going into the device and thus completely failed to justify their conclusion of anomalous power. They still draw that conclusion without even mentioning either of these issues as issues and are therefore, at the very least, grossly incompetent at the task of verifying Rossi's claims.

This test means NOTHING.

I want a new test, by a new not-incompetent team, at an independent location where they plug the device into their ammeter which is plugged into their wall outlet.

Nothing less will convince me.

So here's the thing…

E-Cat is an obvious hoax, but nevertheless picked up by the press who repeat it's inventor's claims of "this will fix everything". And that's why articles like this are a public service.

But the *exact* same thing is true of "hot fusion" as well. These devices will never work, if the definition of "work" is "be used for commercial generation". Nevertheless, their "inventors" go on and on about how fusion is the next great power source, and "this will fix everything". And the fawning press regurgitates it word for word.

Oh yeah, NIF is real science and E-Cat isn't, but in the end the outcome is exactly the same. The devices do not work, never will, and yet the press keeps reporting all of this as the next big thing. Can you blame them?

I'm not really upset that there's an article like this about E-Cat, what upsets me is that there's not nearly enough articles about the bogosity of the big labs claims.

What, you don't believe me that it's bogus?

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/fusion-the-power-of-wishf…

Lubos,

I'm not a psychology expert, and even if I were, I doubt that everyone who's intrigued by this is intrigued for the same reasons.

There are some people who buy into the "science doesn't know everything" angle, and think that a tinkerer will show us the way forward. Maybe this is it, they say, dismissing what would be scientific tests.

There are others who loved this on hearing it the first time, and that's their position on it: they love it, period. No evidence -- not even outright evidence of fraud -- will change their minds.

And there are still others who think this is all about money and conspiracy, that Rossi is being oppressed, he's got a trillion dollar gold-mine of an invention, and people are going to swindle him out of it.

For my own perspective, I think we have a responsibility as scientists to tell the public what the science is, what good science is, and whether this is good science or not. (It's not.) And then, to tell them what good science would look like, and demand it. Otherwise, it's not worth listening to.

I don't know whether people need Gods or heroes; some do, others don't. But we all need the truth.

I wonder how hard it would be to produce a sample of copper that had an isotopic mix that suggested nickel-hydrogen fusion.

I'm thinking - is this a foolproof test, or could Rossi cook up a sample over a month or two using some other neutron source, preload it in his machine and then hand it over for analysis?

But the *exact* same thing is true of “hot fusion” as well. These devices will never work, if the definition of “work” is “be used for commercial generation”.

They work now.

Really.

They are energy positive, more energy comes out than goes in. The designs need to be cheaper and more reliable before commercialisation, and they need to be made able to run longer.

They're at the stage of "The Kittyhawk". You didn't complain about that because it couldn't fly the atlantic, did you?

Seems to me that a mixture of aluminum dust and ferric oxide dust would make an excellent "catalyst" for such a device, if you know what I mean. Maybe the first device melted because they used too much thermite in it?

I read the comments posted here by all the "true believers", and all I can do is laugh.

Comment text too LIGHT to read, didn't bother. Well done.

Aside from E-Cat, I'm happy that there's continued research going into fission and fusion power. I'd be happier if the new implementations were just around the corner. The Gen IV reactors appear to be a couple of decades away and fusion, as always, seems to be 50yrs away. Maybe we'll get lucky and Lockheed Martin will have their 100MW fusion reactors available in 10yrs. That would appear to rely on untested advances in materials and manufacturing though, so my expectations are managed.

For all those claiming Rossi has to keep his magic ingredients secret, otherwise "they" would rip him off... you're morons.

Science does not happen by miracles. If, somehow, Rossi found a "fusion catalyst", then, every scientific paper, study, article, etc., that he read before he produced his invention is out there for anyone else to read. If he could make a leap from existing knowledge to a new discovery, someone else, looking at the same existing knowledge, can and will make the same leap. The longer Rossi refuses to document his alleged process, the better the odds someone else will walk the same road he did.. and keep walking right to the patent office and the Nobel Prize. Then all Rossi can do is fume and fuss and claim he invented it first... but he could never prove he did so, so since he didn't document his discovery before someone else made it public, and no one would have reason to believe his after-the-fact claims that this was "his" process all along.

It is ludicrously trivial to prove the e-cat works, as the article shows. Rossi refuses to do so. Instead, he runs stage-managed public shows, hoping to keep the game going as long as he can. To what end? Got me. Most likely, simply the joy of knowing how many otherwise intelligent people he's fooled. To a true con artist, the con is an end in itself.

Be careful about the statement that only Ni62 and Ni64 can fuse with hydrogen, or that it's impossible to get 10% Cu from the Ni.

The dominant isotope of Ni is Ni58. Ni58 can capture a proton, becoming Cu59. Cu59 is unstable, but the predominant decay chain is beta decay with an 82 ms half-life. So proton capture on Ni58 doesn't produce Copper but instead Ni59, which will itself decay over thousands of years to Co59.

The real test, as the article notes is to look for gamma rays during the experiment. Alternately, one can perform an isotopic analysis of Ni, looking for the replacement of Ni58 by Ni59.

And think of all the millions of dollars wasted by people trying to prevent hydrogen from dissolving in and then just diffusing out of stainless steel vessels at high temperatures. All they had to do was wrap a Rossi reactor around it and the hydrogen would have been too scared to leave.
http://www.kps.or.kr/jkps/downloadPdf.asp?articleuid=%7B21F3549A-6054-4… as an example of serious research into the subject.

"They are energy positive, more energy comes out than goes in"

And as I clearly stated:

“work” is “be used for commercial generation”

No fusion reactors are being used for commercial generation, so they don't "work".

Simply put, there is no development of existing technology that results in a practical device that would ever be used. But don't take my word for it, take the word of the director of the entire US fusion research effort.

Very wise, Ethan. You're not a psychologist but as far as I can say, you could be one, too, although - for example in the asylums - some people building on visual perceptions could have doubts which side of the door is which. ;-)

Ugg, pressed send too quickly…

"They’re at the stage of “The Kittyhawk”."

No, they're not. They're at this stage:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19788_5-recklessly-stupid-attempts-at-hu…

When the Kittyhawk flew it was perfectly obvious how to make it fly across the Atlantic. You needed to improve the power to weight ratio of the engine about 5 fold. Even then, engines with roughly double the power/performance were available, like the Balzer-Manley designs. It should be no surprise that the Spirit was powered by a Wright engine.

The designs in the article above were likewise able to be made to work. But they're not flying around today. That's because no design is an island - while each of these was being improved, so was the Wright's design. By the time they even got to the point of "sorta works", the bar had been set much, much higher. So they simply never became useful.

So back to fusion.

As it stands, magnetic fusion is about the stage of the aircraft designs above, while laser fusion is more like a child's paper airplane with no wings. Unlike the Kittyhawk, however, the path to commercial use is not even remotely clear. In the case of MFE, we really don't have any tested solutions to things like online tritium extraction, self-heating control, core replacement, or hosts of other issues. In the case of IFE, it's not even clear we can *ever* get to Q=1 - Shiva, Nova and NIF were all supposed to and failed. R-T is a bitch.

Meanwhile, solar PV prices continue to implode and are at grid parity on the retail side pretty much everywhere. Wind long ago hit parity on the wholesale side. And prices are still falling. Large-format li-ion is just starting into its demand/production curve. and prices are down about 50% in the last two years. Some time in the next five years the total CAPEX of a 24-hour base load wind or solar machine will be at grid parity.

And then what do we need fusion for? By the time any of the fusion technologies is ready for the market, assuming such a thing does become possible (and I don't), no one will want it. It's locked in precisely the same place as the "multiplane", something that was interesting when first introduced (Tuck and Ware, 1948) but simply lost out on the technology curve to, well, practically everything.

It's a big joke. Everyone knows it, and has for years. But once that money starts flowing, it's hard to say no.

axil:

“The big problem is one that has to do with the quantum mechanics issue. The nuclear energy comes in a big energy quantum, and if it didn’t get broken up, then the big energy quantum would get expressed as energetic particles, as normally happens in nuclear reactions. So the approach we’ve taken is that we’ve said “the only conceivable route for making sense of these observations at all, is that the big energy quanta have to get sliced and diced up into a very very large number if much smaller energy quanta.” The much larger number is on the order of several hundred million.

Yes, that is exactly what you've done. You see no gammas, so you posit a form of reaction that doesn't produce them. Yet this hypothetical reaction has never been seen in any indpendent experiment. Physicists conduct thousands if not millions of controlled nuclear reactions every year, world wide, and yet the only people who ever see this effect are cold fusionists.

Put simply the mechanism you posit is irreproducible

But I want you to answer a different question, if you will. In Rossi's last experiment they did open up the device after the test and they did find copper - in isotopic abundances that matched natural Cu. Now, the device did not contain any copper to begin with. Nickle fusion simply could not have produced the isotopic ratios seen. No chemical reaction can transmute elements. So, Axil, how do you think it got in there?

Laugh all you want; but back to the future time machines use garbage and cold fusion engines.

How does this fit into the scam theory that have been described here above. I may be being scammed but before I admit to being so gullible please explain how the wire setup that feeds power to all the test equipment and computers feed out of a wall plug could run a dummy test without heat production.

From the following:

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-rossi-e-cat-energy-density-higher.html

To investigate whether there really is something special about the powder fuel in the small cylinder, the researchers performed a "dummy" test with an empty cylinder. They ran the test in March on the E-Cat HT2 for about 6 hours, taking measurements exactly as they did when the cylinder was loaded. They found that no extra heat was generated beyond that expected from the electric input. Whatever kind of catalyst is in the fuel seems to be indispensable for generating the excess energy.

Please explain, thanks.

When they ran the dummy test, Rossi didn't turn on the extra power that their setup was incapable of detecting.

Come on. You couldn't have thought of that yourself? Did you... try?

Reference post 96

Eric

There are chemical reactions that can concentrate EMF. Most people in Nanoplasmonics are chemists. “Hot spots” in Nanoplasmonics have been experimentally shown to produce power densities of up to tens of terawatts per cm2.

Check out dark mode Fano resonance.

The Ni/h reactor has just increased this power density by a few more orders of magnitude.

I suggest you study up on Nanoplasmonics, because that is where the employment opportunities will be in the near future.

Nuclear physics will be dead. The future is in chemistry. Adapt or be unemployed.

Rossi was in the US when the test was conducted. There was a tech there for support only. The tech was under the observation and control of the testers.

Reference post 96

Eric

The transmutation products are variable based on the geometry of the nano-antennas in the micro/nano powder.

The reference I gave you from DGT shows that most transmutation ash in that system was in light elements.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat-is-back-an…

comment 2013.05.23 Thursday noon PST

Ethan, I appreciate your spirited critique, especially the simple hidden double wire scam -- which if power was actually supplied at high voltages, could be very small in diameter.

I wonder if this can explain the remarkably constant temperature rises and falls with exponential curves shown for runs of up to 5 days?

within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray
rmforall at gmail.com

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf

page 25 bottom:

Remarks on the test

An interesting aspect of the E-Cat HT2 is certainly its capacity to operate in self-sustaining mode.

The values of temperature and production of energy which were obtained are the result of averages not merely gained through data capture performed at different times;
they are also relevant to the resistor coils’ ON/OFF cycle itself.

By plotting the average temperature vs time for a few minutes of test (Plot 3) one can clearly see how it varies between a maximum and a minimum value with a fixed periodicity.

Plot 3. Average surface temperature trend of the E-Cat HT2 over several minutes of operation.

Note the heating and cooling trends of the device, which appear to be different from the exponential characteristics of generic resistor.

Looking at Plot 3, the first feature one notices is the appearance taken by the curve in both the heating and cooling phases of the device.

If we compare these in detail with the standard curves of a generic resistor (Plot 4 and Plot 5), we see that the former differ from the latter in that they are not of the exponential type.

Plot 4. Comparing the typical heating curve of a generic resistor (left, [Ref. 9]) to the one relevant to one of the E-Cat HT2’s ON states.

Finally, the complete ON/OFF cycle of the E-Cat HT2, as seen in Plot 3, may be compared with the typical heating-cooling cycle of a resistor, as displayed in Plot 6.

Plot 6. Heating and cooling cycle of a generic resistor [Ref. 9].

The trend is described by exponential type equations.

What appears obvious here is that the priming mechanism pertaining to some sort of reaction inside the device speeds up the rise in temperature, and keeps the temperatures higher during the cooling phase.

Another very interesting behavior is brought out by synchronically comparing another two curves:
power produced over time by the E-Cat HT2, and power consumed during the same time.

An example of this may be seen in Plot 7, which refers to about three hours of test.

The resistor coils ON/OFF cycle is plotted in red, while the power-emission trend of the device appears in blue.

Plot 8. Detail taken from Plot 7, reproducing the first two periods of the cycle.

The three time intervals in which each period may be divided are labeled by Roman numerals.

Further food for thought may be found by analyzing the trend of the ratio between energy produced and energy consumed by the E-Cat HT2, as referred to the same time interval dealt with in Plot 7.

The blue curve in Plot 9 is the result of the analysis, and is reproduced here together with the red curve of power consumption normalized to 1.

Basically, for every second taken into account, the corresponding value of the blue curve is calculated as the ratio between the sum of the power per second emitted in all the previous seconds, and the sum of the power per second consumed in all the previous seconds.

Plot 9. The blue curve is the result of the ratio between energy produced and consumed by the E-Cat HT2, with reference to the same time instants dealt with in Plot 7.

The red curve represents the ON/OFF trend of the resistor coils normalized to 1.

All the above trends are remarkable, and warrant further in-depth enquiry.

They don't mention that in their test procedure describing the March test, so where are you getting that? Not that it matters. I can think of many ways to surreptitiously activate a device even while being continuously monitored -- trivially so if the observers are naive, credulous, and/or incompetent. Like these ones. I'm sure you could think of ways to fool this too, if you tried.

If instead you're going to try to argue how such subterfuge couldn't possibly work, save it.

Just like before, such arguments from incredulity are meaningless. The test is what matters. And if the test had been done properly, then such speculation would not be necessary.

If it were ME who had invented a revolutionary device and was trying to convince the world that it was real, I would INSIST on a test that eliminated these simple and obvious sources of fraud. I know I'm not a fraud, but the point is to prove it to an appropriately skeptical audience. The way to do this is with a properly designed test.

If the independent testers who came in were too naive, trusting, or ignorant to know how to do this, I would tell them. When they showed me their AC-only meter I'd say "What about DC current?" When they went to clamp their meter on the input lede, I'd insist they put it in series with the plug, measuring all conductors. Because I would know that otherwise I'd never convince those who were not naive, trusting, or ignorant.

If I was a fraud, I'd make sure to only allow tests which would fail to account for fraud, even knowing it would fail to convince those who were not naive, trusting, or ignorant. Those who were would still be fooled, and argue about how unlikely it is that I'd go to the trouble. And then invest in my company.

If I was the real deal, yet somehow ignorant of how to conduct a properly convincing test, well, then... sadly, I would be indistinguishable from a fraud.

Some points to ponder, if you run the numbers:

1. To produce the supposed excess energy generated over 116 hours would require about 100 Kg of lithium-based batteries.

2. To produce the supposed excess power would require a wire feed (and return) carrying just a few milliAmps at a few Kilovolts.

3. The clamp ammeters are incapable of detecting not only DC but also incapable of detecting frequencies above about 60 Hz.

Cold fusion is real; it's here; it's now!

So stop bitching about cold fusion not being real.

You can buy cold fusion hair extensions, T-shirts, Adobe cold fusion software for PC or Mac.

You can even upgrade your motorcycle with the COLD FUSION NITROUS SYSTEM.

Like how real does cold fusion have to be.

If cold fusion wasn't real; do you think that they'd interview Andrea Rossi on The Smart Scarecrow Show? That's what I'm talking about.

eric wrote:
Yes, that is exactly what you’ve done. You see no gammas, so you posit a form of reaction that doesn’t produce them. Yet this hypothetical reaction has never been seen in any indpendent experiment. Physicists conduct thousands if not millions of controlled nuclear reactions every year, world wide, and yet the only people who ever see this effect are cold fusionists.

The cold fusionists are looking for these reactions in metal hydrides under specific conditions.

The other physicists are looking for reactions in particle accelerators.

the question is not if this is fusion -- or cold fusion --

the question is does the thing produce more power than what was put in --- and the answer seems to be yes

If you want to argue if this is fusion go ahead -- I am not a physicist - I do not think so personally --

I argue who cares how it works as long as his catalyst isn't weapons grade plutonium i think we have a winner here

At first i thought this was a reasonable critism of the paper -- but it's not -- this is just another hype generator.

It did not consume 900W of power 65% of the time -- but i do agree the experiment could have been done with better controls.

But as it stands everyone agreed that it produced heat. And that the resistance provided by the heating coils would not have created such a high temp

For the more ignorant people : Here is the CEO of National instruments, James Truchard in his keynote of 2012 confirming Cold fusion and Rossi (which he doesn't specify by name)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxjxFdFEBsw
it starts at 14:00

"I told Wilbur and I told Orville that the dam' thing will never fly. The idiots just won't listen."

Q: whose famous words are these?

@CB So I have a serious problem with you calling testers stupid or naive when you were not there. I don't have a problem discussing the issues but cut out the silly namecalling and slandering.

with respect to your post about the hidden DC current, two things come to mind.
1) In some of these AC analyzers an excessive DC offset trips a fault and causes the system to have to power cycle. I think this is one of them but I'm not sure how much is excessive. you can dig into it if you'd like
PCE-830 power analyser - PCE Group

2) Ask the testers instead of calling them stupid

3)Since they tested a dummy Ecat with the exact same setup it's harder to believe that a hidden DC source was there for one and not for the other considering their calorimetry was only 7% off the actual measured input value and the DC source would have to be significant.

4)In the interviews post test they all seem to indicate that they checked for all that but did not put everything in the report.

I was actually impressed by the simplicity of the calorimetry. Hard to hide anything. Flow calorimetry would have had all kinds of issues like hidden fuels, thermocouple placement errors, etc ad nauseum.

The other brilliant thing they did was heat up the dummy ecat to a comparable temperature such that the IR camera calibration was similar.

This along with all the conservative estimates was well done.

To believe that Rossi somehow fools everybody he meets is fine but to what end I don't know.

With this test Rossi has gotten my attention but not my pocketbook just yet.

There are quite a lot of red flags if you read through the paper quickly, my bullshit meter went off a couple of times even though my background is in fairly basic levels of chemistry and biology.
For example: why the heck are they measuring temperature using an infrared camera? Isn't this like me trying to gauge the temperature in my back yard by counting the number of butterflies?
Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems to me that you could quite easily devise half a dozen tests to see whether this is real or not. And these guys haven't done any of them.

If this was real the guy would be generating electricity for the grid, not publicity.

Axil, you've already shown successfully you don't understand physics. I guess it's natural to add "I don't know anything about chemistry" to your resume.
As you quite obviously didn't get the little hint early, let me spell it out explicitly: If you heat hydrogen in a red glowing stainless steel vessel, the hydrogen will diffuse out in short order. As they are not refilling hydrogen to their system, any reactions going on inside will not involve hydrogen after a few minutes. As they claim a constant process over days, you will need a new culprit for the miracle heat.

Reference post 117

Because of Rossi's enclosed fuel capsule security design, it is hard to know how Rossi is handing hydrogen pressure.

As you know, an oxide or carbide coating on the inside surface of the stainless steal can reduce hydrogen leakage by 5 orders of magnitude. Other thinks can be done to increase this.

DGT does actively control hydrogen pressure. Their security design is different.

Axil: re polaritons. Nucleons are on the order of one angstrom. So you claim that the wavelength is somehow stretched to thousands of angstrom because of entanglement?? I don't see this magical mechanism explained in the paper. If the authors don't understand what's going on, maybe they should open the black box and let real scientists take a look inside.

There has always been, and will always be, people who enjoy defrauding others, The same can be said for people who swallow the scam hook, line, and sinker. Rossi and his supporters here demonstrate this.

I don't need to have been there. It's right there in the paper: Their test did not control for extremely basic methods of fraud, completely undermining half of the (power in - power out) equation, thus preventing any possible conclusion. They draw conclusions. Without even mentioning this issue.

They go on and on about the "critical issue" of the paint emissivity, but not word one about making sure the basic parameters of the experiment were valid.

Regardless of what you imagine they might have done but not mentioned in the paper ( I guess they ran out of room?), what they DID do shows that while the test was being performed they had no way of verifying that the input power was what they thought it was.

Nothing else matters. Only the test matters. The test was fatally flawed. As to your issues:

1) Ethan's post already explains how a clamp ammeter can be fooled. It also could have used AC frequencies outside what their meter could detect. There are many ways to fool their power metering.

2) My most important questions were already answered by their paper. Q: Did you put your meter in-line ensuring you measured all conductors? A: No. Q: Does your meter measure currents outside of the type Rossi said he was using? A: No.

The only question I have after that is whether these parts of the experimental setup were their idea, or Rossi's request/requirement.

3) Because their test had no method of determining if there were additional currents going into the machine, obviously they couldn't tell if such a current was present for the "live" test and absent for the "dummy" test.

Think, for goodness sake. Think like someone who is actually trying to prevent deceit. Even -- ESPECIALLY* -- if you believe there isn't. How would you show that?

4) Whatever else they might have done, we know what they *didn't* do, which is properly measure input power in such a way to eliminate fraud during the actual test. It's right there in their paper:

"The clamp ammeters were connected upstream from
the control box to ensure the trustworthiness of the measurements performed"

Which actually ensures the results are UN-trustworthy, because they have no idea how many wires were actually going into that box.

"“They’re at the stage of “The Kittyhawk”.”

No, they’re not."

Yes they are.

Having read through all the comments there are several things I'd like to add.

Re. #81 Luboš Motl and #84 Ethan: Terry Pratchett says we're a narrative species. We live by stories. We need them like we need oxygen. And what I'm seeing here is a tremendous story. It has virtually everything: the maveric scientist battling against the odds, the secrecy, the possibility of huge gains for all mankind, the dismissive reaction of establised scientists (experts!, which is nowadays often used as a dirty word), and the incomprehensible equations and other trappings that give the appearance of real science... This is powerful stuff and humans live for this kind of thing.

Many proponents of cold fusion seem to be under the misapprehension that the sceptics (and I count myself amongst them) don't want this to be true for some reason. I reject this and would like to posit instead that we WANT TO BELIEVE! In fact we want to believe quite badly because we realise the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But we also realise that "the easiest person to fool is yourself" and as such we require absolute proof. Undeniable, independantly reproducible proof. We're not sceptics because we hate you or Mr. Rossi, we're sceptics because the methodology is lacking. And not just a little bit.

Eric (#32) pointed out that this research weighed things with a resolution of 0.1 g. I went to a polytechnic in the 90's and we measured more accurately than that for our chemistry experiments, we weighed to 0.001 grams. I am pretty sure scientific measurements have become cheaper in the meantime so this makes no sense for a recent scientfic paper.

Some people here mentioned the dummy experiment. This sounds reasonable until you realise that both the "experiment" and the "dummy" were black boxes that no one was allowed to look into. No more need be said of this. It's a distraction.

Finally: many people seem to think this can't be a hoax because Mr. Rossi is still doing experiments and whatnot. This proves nothing, many con-men keep going until they caught. This just means they're greedy and society eventually catches up. In any case, we can't entirely discount the idea that Mr. Rossi is fooling himself as well. (See quote from Feinman before.) Even that doesn't matter much because the scientific method is clear: show me your work and methodology and let me reproduce it from scratch. Failure to do so invalidates pretty much everything you say. Like it or not but this is the system that has served us well for hundereds of years and has brought us everything we know, including this very discussion. No need to replace it just yet.

Claims of scientific repression and group-think are not only simplistic but also evidently wrong. Mr. Rossi is clearly finding money to experiment, find publicity and continue his work. Even if that work is deeply flawed and maybe even a complete waste of time according to many critical thinkers.

Just because you want something to be true doesn't mean it is. I wish reality worked that way, I truly do, because we need a better, cheaper and cleaner source of energy. This isn't it.

@Ethan,

Thank you for the followup to the earlier scienceblogs writeup on the E-Cat, sometime back. I do not dispute your assessment of the quality of evidence presented in the paper ("X", as you've called it the comments), but neither do I endorse it. This is something that only academic physicists will be able to sort out.

About your four approaches for determining whether a controlled nuclear reaction, your point (3), concerning gammas, seems to be in error, as is your conclusion that any nuclear reaction in Rossi's device would need to be an p+Ni reaction. Using a little lateral thinking, it is possible to come up with gamma-less reactions that do not involve p+Ni, per se:

p+d+Ni → 3He+Ni

In this hypothetical reaction, the nickel is just a bystander and absorbs some of the momentum, obviating the need for a gamma. This is a variation on Ron Maimon's Pd/D reaction described elsewhere [1]. In requiring gammas and jumping to conclusions about a p+Ni reaction (even if Rossi has asserted such a reaction -- he could be mistaken), you've inadvertently placed theory over evidence.

Eric

[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/13734/6713

* Think like someone who is actually trying to prevent deceit. Especially if you believe there isn't.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

If this is the real deal then I will happily eat crow, made fresh and warm in my replicator. No seriously, I'd weep tears of joy at being so wrong.

I want it to be true. I want it to turn out that tremendous energy is easily acquired if you just know the right trick. But I want to KNOW it's true, that I'm not just fooling myself. That means asking how it's possible that I could be wrong, and testing it.

So it's obvious how I could be fooled into believing it. How could I be fooled into DIS-believing? Well it could be that the test was completely legit, the whole thing is real, and the world is about to change. What would distinguish?

Replication of these results by different teams in an independent location with proper controls. I want something definitive to show that the best thing ever is here.

Call me when that happens. Until then, I'm done. I will not be holding my breath. I don't suggest you do either, though maybe you should hold on to your wallet.

Give a scientist a box that does magical things, and the first thing (s)he'll want to do is bust it open to see what's inside.

If you can't -- or aren't allowed to -- bust it open, it ain't science.

Excellent article. Especially the diagram of how the power input is being faked. I have designed and built computer controlled power systems with up to 200 i/o. One such system was controlling electric furnaces operating at 480 volts with 200 amps of current. So you could say I understand electricity fairly well. It is totally obvious that Rossi is a scam.

Your diagram showing the use of the clamp on meters is exactly how I suspect he is mainly pulling his scam. What is inside his magic tube is irrelevant. It is also irrelevant if it is fusion or not. All that is truly relevant is if Rossi can show excess power output versus input. But all the tests that Rossi allows prohibit inspection of exactly the places any qualified electrical expert I have ever known would want to look. I wouldn't need to see inside his magic tube at all.

All I want is to be able to measure the power input going through MY PATCH CORD that the Rossi device would then be plugged into. Since the makeup of the PATCH CORD would be known you then and only then know the true power input into the Rossi device. With this PATCH CORD you would then accurately know the input voltage and input amperage which would then give you the true power input.

So why not do that very simple test? Whenever we had a power anomaly in any system this was always one of the first things that we would look at. You break the device in question from the power source and then set up a patch cord with the known wires open and BARE without insulation around them to be sure there was not something funny going on.

I am almost 100% certain that a simple PATCH CORD like this would show the whole world that Rossi is a fake in a few minutes.

Electrical circuits are not always wired as you may assume. I lost a good friend who was an very qualified electrical who was working on a 440 volt power input that was inside of steel conduit. The breaker supplying the power to the circuit was off and had been properly locked out. But is wasn't the wires inside the conduit that were hot. It turns out that the conduit itself had been connected to 440 by a previous electrician and when my friend broke the conduit and then grabbed on to the two pieces of the now open electrical circuit, he was literally fried by just touching the conduit. I have always advised electricians to wear nitrile gloves when working on electrical systems for just this reason. My friend would still be alive if he had been wearing them that day.

But the point is that you cannot assume anything in an electrical system if you are doing a scientific study of it.

I can understand Rossi not wanting anyone to see what is inside of his secret magic tube. But not allowing inspection of the internal wiring completely tells you all you need to know about Rossi. The guys who put their names on this paper will be sorry when it all comes out and they look like total fools who fell for the lies of a repeat con man who claims that God talks to him.

Rossi is a total fraud and he knows it. You could prove it in less than three minutes without ever touching his machine with a simple power input patch cord that would cost about $10 to make.

Axil @102:

The transmutation products are variable based on the geometry of the nano-antennas in the micro/nano powder.:

So, let me see if I understand you: your explanation for the natural copper in the previous experimental device is that the geometry of the nano-antennas in a powder caused the device to produce copper in isotopic ratios that precisely match natural copper?

So why did Rossi refuse to have the same test conducted in the last experiment? Micro-antennae in a powder would surely yield at least slightly different isotopic ratios every time, and different ratios would support his claim. OTOH, exactly the same ratios would point to someone sticking natural copper in the device. Do you agree with that?

CB

If it were ME who had invented a revolutionary device and was trying to convince the world that it was real, I would INSIST on a test that eliminated these simple and obvious sources of fraud.

I'd stick it in a satellite, launch it, and wait 10 years until my critics had to admit that the generator must be producing energy. You're talking about benchtop fusion here; that level of investment in either time or money is far less than what you will reap.

Robert @110:

the question is does the thing produce more power than what was put in — and the answer seems to be yes...I argue who cares how it works as long as his catalyst isn’t weapons grade plutonium i think we have a winner here

Every battery produces more energy than it consumes, if you ignore the energy cost of the battery's production. We care how it works because it is trivial to create a system that outputs significant power for a relatively short amount of time. To determine whether this device can output significant power over a very long period using a short-period test, you need to be able to rule out potential short-period energy sources.

Lastly, Axil, you really didn't give a good answer to my point that it's irreproducible. It doesn't matter if you think its chemistry, or caused by nanoplasmonics, or caused by micro-antennae, or any other words you want to throw down. The point is, if the mechanism is real then independent scientists should be able to reproduce it in laboratory experiments outside of the power-generating devices. If they can't, its irreproducible. If Rossi et al. refuse to give independent labs enough information to try, its still irreproducible and ethically fishy to boot.

Sigh here we go again ... must this stupid report by physicists reporting on an electrical engineering problem be discussed by every physics forum.

The physicists could not even wire the device legally to the 3 phase mains in most countries that's how much we trust there opinion on the matter.

The scam is an electrical engineering one the meter used for the testing has a restriction of a power factor between 0.5 and 1.0 and waveforms shape to be valid go look at what those are from the datasheet of the manufacturer.

A heavily distorted waveform will not read correctly on any basic power meter they assume a sine wave with a crest factor. To do irregular shaped waveforms you need a storage section to capture the voltage and current and do an integral over time and even then the waveform must be periodic to make sense of power.

If you note the waveform is a triac being fired into an inductive load and the power factor looks to be about 0.25 well outside the 0.5-1.0 range of the power meter used for the test.

What worries me is Rossi even discusses the special shape of the waveform so he is clearly aware that shape is doing something he directs it as being important to the LENR but reality is it is important to the power meter reading.

Bottom line here is the device is probably pulling far more power from the mains than the meter used in the test measures and get an electrical engineer to do the power tests not a physicist please.

Post@128

Rossi does not trust professional science. It has treated him poorly. He thinks that DGT has stolen his technology, but their technology is very different I think far better. They get a COP of 20.

DGT can produce the LENR effect absolutely.

As I stated above, DGT will demo their unit at Ni week in August.

Post 36, 37, 40

Copper notwithstanding, many LENR theorists don’t believe the 10% iron in the Rossi ash. Rossi can’t make anyone happy.

Ni week is the Mecca of experimental science.

Go there early, and nag the Ni techs who will be setting up the DGT test to do that test right. You owe it to science to be there. They say “seeing believing.”

Look up the work of Piantelli and Arata

Here is a start:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6id5Hf-xMWOYXVjekJCN1ZkQk0/edit?pli=1

Some say that Rossi got his start on his technology from Piantelli.

How is he going to demonstrate the device show us a reading of a power meter where we can't even be sure the meter is reading correct ... wow that will impress us.

Want to impress me get him to disconnect the thing from the mains by converting the excess heat to electricity and make it go self sustaining it is supposed to be a generator after all isn't it?

Surely you must know so long as the device remains connected to the mains and he won't allow proper testing of the electrical circuits the thing screams scam .. he doesn't have to risk his LENR stuff to get proper electrical testing.

I read a reasonably large portion of the comments here... some of which I understood, some of which I looked at cockeyed.

I think we've talked a lot of science here. True or not... the nice thing is this comment thread sparks something that should be applied to the very experiment itself... the scientific debate of the community. I think that in and of itself, is a keen representation of what fails here. Rossi isn't seeking peer review. He isn't looking to be proved right, or wrong. From my point of view, I only see argumentative battles towards critics... something that has been seen before, both in violent terms (the church on most of modern astronomy), and in less violent terms (the invention of Radio). Crazy be damned, genius be damned.

Practically though, there are many that stand to lose, if Rossi is correct. Now, I don't really care to debate science here, the reality is I stand biased on one side and I admit that - I don't believe Rossi stands in the correct light. We are a world of greed. While science, for the most part, likes to be on the opposite side to that (we do spend money well don't we?), the reality stands: there are those that stand to lose from energy that is provided in ways that erases one of the greatest needs of all planet earth.

Why, in all of this debate, do we not have those individuals stepping up?

Where is BP? Where is Exxon? Where is OPEC?

And for that matter, I have to question the validity of someone who claims to have discovered something that is potentially the entrance into a new age of human advancement, and holds it hidden in such a way that obviously fits into the latter greed profile. Wouldn't this discovery be something someone would want to share with the world, not only as a scientist but by the very reason that one would seek "free" energy? By the very nature of hiding it such that the key is held by a small few, the danger of it being kept and hidden away - profited by the very evil abuse of science itself - makes me lose confidence in Rossi. This concept, if it solves even in the slightest that which is ultimately setting us on our path of destruction, deserves to be unleashed such that it /can/ be that solution. Any other route, is blasphemous on the very concept. Better business decision? Hogwash if we are talking about free energy.

@CB. I have no problem with you being skeptical and asking questions. It's your ASSUMption that fraud was commited that is annoying.

Here are a couple of thoughts.
The double wire clamping showing zero ac according to Ethan is not exactly true. The waveforms would have to perfectly cancel out. If its not it would show up as noise or an attenuated signal.
According to krivits interview with Essen it was Levi and foschi that chose the test equipment and setup the test so they would have to be complicit because rossi couldn't of known where they would place meters and of what type. For example I assume the "switch" would have been in the control box so current sensors after it would have detected foul play.

Levi and others stated they could look at anything that was not the powder so they chose not to inspect the wiring in your scenario and Rossi could not have known.

This argument has been used many times with Rossi it's amazing how he can predict what things people won't look at and place his sly deception at exactly that spot.

@134

It is not the money.

Rossi has said in the beginning that the only way for him and LENR to be taken seriously in the orthodox science community is to have his device in their basements.

When you beat a dog hard for a long time, the poor dog will bite back. It is bad for the dog and bad for the owner.

If Rossi has nothing, then he got what he deserved. If he does have something, the owner should expect the bite. This is the nature of things.

I don't think it is double clamped either I am sure the meter is reading wrong because of the waveforms and probably power factor.

If you go an read Rossi comments on the waveform he is well aware the shape has something to do with the so called energy excess.

He may even be innocently wrong in not understanding what is most likely happening that most basic quality power meters will likely misread on the device because it legally shouldn't be allowed to be connect to the mains in most countries because of it's noise and power factor. Anything over 70W that is switching power needs compliance in most countries. The sort of basic power meters that were used assume that sort of compliance they don't work correctly for heavily distorted waveforms and power factors.

Basically the test needs the device to comply to all the normal power standards or else let an electrical engineer do a more detailed testing none of which should worry Rossi because it needs no disclosure of what the device does and how,

Realistically the comment still stands getting the thing off the mains would be more impressive it is after all supposed to generate power and having to already have mains power for it to works sort of makes it useless anyhow.

For those of you of the physics bend interested in electrical engineering yokogawa who manufactures high end lab power meters has a tutorial on power meters and the problems of distorted waveforms etc

https://www.yokogawa.com/ymi/tutorial/tm-tutorial_wt_02.htm

It should hopefully give you an insight into the problems with the report.

Actually you are the one who has forgotten that science is not about revealed truth. You are really treating A. Rossi as a heretic. There is real evidence from reputable scientists funded by an organization with an impecable reputation that he is getting rsults. Instead of dimissing real results you consider trying to understand the phenomenon. . You are making an attack that argues that A. Rossi's results are impossible because you don't understand it.. So, you attack good messengers because you refuse to consider the results. You have forgotten that empirical science always allows for the opportunity to overturn the current understanding. e.g. relativilty etc. Consider the CERN neutrino experiment has been repeated and they got the same faster than light results that were reported last fall. That is despite all those who said that was impossible because they were terrified by the implications. Being terrified is not an argument for dismissing results from highly regarded scientists using some of the best tools in the world. one of the third party team despite well regarded professor is the former chair of the Sweedish Skeptical Society i.e he is not likely to be easily fooled, incompetent or corrupt. I am not completely sure Rossi is right but I have seen real evidence that he is that is far more convincing than to say that this is silly. Because, smart people like me know that LENR is impossible. Sometimes it takes an outsider to pursue what those bound by the conventional wisdom cannot/will not consider. That is, of course, . But, never forget, that almost always is not always. On a few rare occassions the strange outsider is right. This may be such a case.

"He may even be innocently wrong in not understanding "

Like the genuinely deluded deniers of AGW, he may be getting a result he likes and then NOT LOOKING ANY MORE. Just fiddled and fiddled until he saw less energy in the metering than coming out by the measuring method, stopped and claimed "COLD FUSION".

I.e. self delusion and non-scientific, but not a deliberate scammer.

Being a deliberate scammer would ALSO explain the observations, so we'd need some method of measuring and discerning which hypothesis is true.

Then, the question is to know who has the reason on this case... if one scientic who wasn´t in the test or 3 who were there....
of course i am not going to buy the ecat ...

and the amneter of the image never read 0.

"Practically though, there are many that stand to lose, if Rossi is correct."

Practically, many stand to win if he's correct.

Your statement does not contain a knock-down/drag-out argument that proves your point.

This is obviously a fraudulent device and I'm surprised the conversation has gone on so long. Every important scientific discovery must pass verification testing to gain acceptance among the scientific community. That's simply the way it is, and without this rule we'd have endless numbers of machines that claimed to do something that they do not. Since every other successful discovery has managed to weather this kind of scrutiny, I see no reason why this one should be excepted. In fact the insistence that the results should be accepted lacking proper scientific testing just lends credence to the idea that it's just another scam.

You can come up with any arguments you like to support your assertion that your device must be excepted from testing, but none are valid and it's not going to happen. The so called inventors know this, of course, and are playing this little game to stretch out their 15 minutes of fame as long as they can.

But pass a true scientific test and the world will immediately beat a path to your doorway, arms straining to carry all the money they want to invest.

EPPUR SI MUOVE

For all the time you have spent on this elaborate blog post, the least you could have done is carefully read the report.

You are so skeptical that you can't bring yourself to carefully read the report. See the rebuttal to your post over at E-Cat World. It's clear that your critique is invalid.

That's OK though. Skeptics are expected, and they should be present in the debate. The bar is set high. The thing is, people like you will not recognize when the bar has been cleared. That's no problem though, we'll just move forward without you.

Ethan,

Who knows you may be correct that this is smoke and mirrors however your conception that *you* know better what science is than professors of nuclear physics is not something I can easily accept. In fact, it seems that you are the one guilty of holding tightly to the idea of "this can't be." Your mention of "this would change the world" reinforces that.

One thing is for sure - your underlying preconceptions create an attitude that is far from the scientific approach you claim to embrace. "The E-Cat is back and . . ." Please. Go write for TMZ and stop pretending to be scientific.

Good science is first of all unbiased and that's not something one can say of this article.

Yeah, if you're looking for facts, then that's biased because you're not looking to make things up!

BRING BALANCE BACK TO SCIENCE!!! TEACH THE HEALING CRYSTAL!!!

Who knows you may be correct that this is smoke and mirrors however your conception that *you* know better what science is than professors of nuclear physics

Now HERE is a genuine example of the appeal to authority fallacy: the claim resides ENTIRELY on "they are professors of nuclear physics". And is also incorrect, which is a bonus.

"axil
May 22, 2013

Rossi would have had to design a world class electric fraud plan to anticipate what equipment was going to be used in the test.

He did not know what the test plan was and could not know if this fraud plan would cover every case and equipment configuration."
-
You forget that the test was conducted principally by G. Levi, a close friend and associate of Rossi's who's been working with him from the start. Levi did an early test of Rossi's ecat in which he found 135 kW produced briefly from a device the size of your fist. That was probably a misplaced T-out thermocouple that contacted the electrical heater.

Levi is the person who refused to show actual data to Steve Krivit when interviewed. He refused to duplicate the original experiment with proper controls when asked by Brian Josephson. He could easily be in on Rossi's scam and he provided most of the equipment used in this experiment.

It is highly probable that Rossi faked all the results by sleight of hand involving the input power. Possibly it was by some other method.

The thing that's for sure is that this was no independent test with Levi running most of it.

Rossi has many people working with him on his LENR, so are they in on the scam too? Perhaps they are all simply misreading the results of the output? And now that would include 3rd party scientists from other countries. I will go ahead and agree with the skeptics, that something is wrong here. But even saying that now requires some justification. Why would all of these scientists willingly get caught up in a giant act of fraud? If it isn't fraud, and everyone is simply misreading this, how can these scientists (i believe the paper had 7 scientific authors) all be wrong? All of this in and of itself is kind of an interesting story at this point. Perhaps it's worth a segment on 60 Minutes.

Wow: "...you get the power out from the “secret catalytic properties” of lemons!"

MandoZink: "Well crap. It was my running assumption that Satan WAS the secret catalyst in these tests..."

Perhaps they used satanic lemons!

@Deleo77
"...so are they in on the scam too?"

In on it or just deluded.

"how can these scientists (i believe the paper had 7 scientific authors) all be wrong?"

Easily. People are very good at lying to themselves, and scientists are no exception.
This is why rigorous tests are needed; and that is exactly what this was not.

make a container, enclose the equipment in it on stilts, let it drive something outside the container. Define what goes into the container, relative what goes out of it. measure if it differ, and maybe also how long it can 'do work'

Eh, the container should be on stilts, not necessarily the equipment, although maybe both :) should be best..

Let's be clear. If this isn't a fraud, with 300% energy amplification, Rossi doesn't need a patent, or independent verification, or anything to do with the scientific community at all. He can provide heating to smelters and processing plants at a fraction of the cost from furnaces. So go little man, go! Power just one plant, and all those declined patents will be granted right after the entire physics knowledge base is turned onto its head. You will become incalculably rich, and the rest of the scientists and I will spent the next decade wondering how we could be so stupid.

I fear that the scientists are involved in the fraud. An idea that darkens my mood considerably. At 300% energy amplification, and knowing the history of bullshit cold fusion claims, there's no way anyone could spend 3 days in the same room as this little tin can and still be fooled so completely as to publish a paper.

The paper seems to meet all the criteria you outlined for method #4. There was a second version of the paper uploaded on Monday. There's actually a plot of power in and power out as a function of time. Did you look through that one? You should revise your blog post to reflect the changes.

I can get 10000% energy amplification.
Heating element in petrol. Petrol combusts and continues the energy.

It isn't cold fusion, though.

You need more than "300% energy amplification", even if you've proven that there is energy amplification.

My prediction still stands: three years time, there will be no sign of this having done anything.

Nobody has managed a different prediction yet.

LCD: I'll make this quick.

A DC current is always exactly cancelled by its return current. Tuning a sinusoidal current so it's in phase with its return current is simple. Noise on your 120 Vac wall outlet is completely expected. The obvious place for the secret-conductor switch is in the wall or in another room. It would not matter where they clamped the ammeter; they would detect nothing. If it was a DC bias then no inductive ammeter could have detected it at all even without a hidden conductor. They could look at the apparatus all day and never find anything amiss.

At worst all Rossi had to do was be sure the testers he let in would assume in their experimental setup that the device ran on normal 120V 60Hz AC just like he said. That's all the cleverness and pre-cognizance he needs. But that's preposterous. It must be fusion!

Trebor said "Easily. People are very good at lying to themselves, and scientists are no exception. This is why rigorous tests are needed; and that is exactly what this was not."

And that's all that needs to be said.

Have fun convincing yourself that this obviously not-rigorous test still meant something, folks, I'll be somewhere else, waiting for actual proof which, to the surprise of very few, will never come.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

The pragmatic solution to all this is quite simple; you don't invest anything until Target and Kmart is selling them off the shelf as backup generators. Not only can you be somewhat sure they work at that point (a generator is much harder to fake than homeopathic medicine; electrical circuits don't produce placebo effects), but waiting for mass production means the price will be several orders of magnitude lower.

The secret catalyst is a mix of carbon and iron because it has great lattice properties

@CB I think it's unlikely that they would not have detected a hidden current source for many reasons including the fact they tested a dummy load.

Also Ethan's diagram does not even represent the electrical setup they used.

And now there is some pseudo scientists claiming they used the thermal camera incorrectly, like this moron lobos Motl

I would like to see more tests, since it is a big claim, than just two, but they now have my attention.

LCD, how do you know that?

The information available did not allow them to check the power supply and required they only accept it was a standard AC ammeter.

I would like to see the next LENR test televised 24/7 on the internet using a web cam in the same way that NASA sometimes shows their missions.

The web feed can be picked up by interested web sites. This will allow real time reaction to the experiment from those who watch.

If I wanted to fake it, I would have used something like thermite inside, ignited it with the resistors, and configured the thermite into a sufficiently small/large volume and contiguity, e.g. a coiled fuse embedded in something that would prevent the thermite from just melting through the bottom and revealing the "secret", and then keep the power on as a distraction - old dirt track racing trick - gather everybody around the hood and keep it secret - while the real trick is back in the differential. It appears possible that all of Rossi's hard work has gone into creating a good enough hoax to raise the stakes high enough to make more than a paltry million. If I were evil.

A couple years ago, I spent many hours investigating this, and realized this scam. Part of the scam is to get big companies to invest in this.
The key fact is that Rossi would never allow simple output energy tests, as commented in #4, in above article.
This is not his first scam. It is too bad that so many people are foolish enough to keep believing in this outright lie.

But if it is a scam Rossi is putting a lot of pressure on himself to sustain it. Imagine if you were trying to scam 3rd party scientists; would you leave the room and let them run a 100+ hour test of the device without you even being there? After that test would you tell the scientists to come back and do the same thing for a 6 month test? I am waiting for more testing just like everyone else. But if Rossi is scamming everyone, he is really starting to count on pulling off some big time magic tricks to do it.

If the conspiracy theorists are down to Rossi standing in another room and flipping on a secret power supply, that is really beginning to reach for a theory. Rossi would be charged with fraud and would be ruined. What would motivate him to do such a basic and malicious hoax for years? How does he plan to get away with that for a 6 month test?

oh, this guy is still making "tests"? "independent tests"? as he done last year and the year before?

why he´s still making this whole thing up you ask? see his history, rossi is an perfect example of an pseudo-innovator with no scientific background that craves for recognition. i guess thats the whole point of that whats driving this man. nothing more.

"scam 3rd party scientists; would you leave the room and let them run a 100+ hour test of the device without you even being there?" again, you forgot his close friend levi; he´d controlled the device.

"off some big time magic tricks to do it." not a big time magic trick; if u research in the comments or at newenergytimes, his tricks are pretty simple, not to say ridiculous simple.

in fact, i am pretty sure that is "hotEcat" is nothing more than something like that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HdbKKvOiWU
i saw a photo last year of one of his so called "demonstrations" of his "hotEcat" and its looked EXACTLY like an simple induction heater.

"But if it is a scam Rossi is putting a lot of pressure on himself to sustain it"

Look at the prophets who predict that the world will end THIS year. OK, in a few years time. OK, but this time for sure, ...

Compared to the belief that God/Satan has told you to kill people, it's pretty benign.

I am still open to the idea that it is all a big hoax. But if it is, why open up the device for third party testing? And yes, the Swedish scientists were a 3rd party. The were paid by a Swedish utility to examine the device (as a potential customer). They did a test with the e-cat cylinder and saw an amazing output of heat. Then they put in a dummy cylinder filled with nothing and got no output of heat. How did Rossi do that? He wasn't in the room. So his friend Levi would have had to conduct the hoax. He would have to be in on it. And the level of heat was way off the charts compared to any accepted science today. This isn't an induction heater, we're talking about magnitudes hotter than any conventional device that exists today. It is a level of heat that could be used for power generation.

So ok, maybe it is some kind of magic trick. But it would be a good one that just fooled a team of nuclear scientists in a 100 hour test. Rossi would deserve a lot of credit for simply doing that. It could all be pseudo science, but I would like to see someone try to replicate this trick.

This is no scam or hoax. There is real science behind it !

The science of Money Laundering...

The "Cold Fusion" and "E-cat" abracadabra is the best way to distract people from what is going on. And looking to all the comments above, it works exactly as intended by the maker.

@Hannes,

I didn't follow. How does a successful E-Cat magic trick serve as a foil for money laundering?

"But if it is, why open up the device for third party testing?"

It hasn't been.

Well, I am saying it was observed by a group of scientists from Sweden who by all accounts have no vested interest in the device succeeding, and they made an honest attempt to report on what they saw. Below is what one of the scientists said he checked for in terms of an external power supply. Even he said this experiment was not proof. Again, if this is a magic trick, it is a good one. Hopefully the 6 month test will happen so these scientists can do further observations. If this is all a hoax Rossi will not be able to maintain it for much longer.

http://ecatnews.com/?p=2528

If Rossi has a finished product (the three 1MW Cold-cats, aka "Blue Containers") that he has already delivered to US customers (as per Rossi), why did he choose to run the test on something (the Hot-cat) that is in an very early stage of development?

Could it be that he's kicking the ball forward, hoping that we forget about the Cold-cat, and accept another couple of years of excuses about not bringing the Hot-cat to market?

Courtesy of Pure Energy Systems News -

Q&A With Hanno Essen Regarding Recent E-Cat Test

http://www.pureenergyblog.com/2013/05/26/1232/8502322_qa-with-hanno-ess…

Reported On Page 22 of G. Levi et al

“. . .the weight that may be assigned [so what’s wrong with the actual measurement that indicates a precision of 10 parts per million so that it can’t be documented?] to the powder charges is therefore in the order of 0.3 g: here it shall be assumed to have a value [ instead ! ! ] of 1 g [ ! ! ! ] to take into account any possible source of error. . .

This, my friend, is an error uncertainty of over 300% greater than the reported value, based solely on "assumption" [ ! ]. Using this “data” the weight of the spent fuel could have just as well scientifically defensibly been reported as “- 0.6g”. This “data” would then have allowed us to explain the E-cat as having transmuted all of the nickel fuel mass and some of the container into pure energy, which would have readily explained the “. . Anomalous Heat Energy Production. . . ” - at a level which would have melted the entire building(s) for hundreds of meters around and converted tons of it into a plasma vapor.

These people are not scientists or engineers but sloppy charlatans preying on the halt and dumb - pure and simple. Fool me once. . .

A Real Scientist

http://www.energikatalysatorn.se/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=560&sid=5450…

Torbjörn Hartman describes his efforts doing the test. More info for you to mull over.

QUOTE:

Remember that there were not only three clamps to measure the current on three phases but also four connectors to measure the voltage on the three phases and the zero/ground line. The protective ground line was not used and laid curled up on the bench. The only possibility to fool the power-meter then is to raise the DC voltage on all the four lines but that also means that the current must have an other way to leave the system and I tried to find such hidden connections when we were there. The control box had no connections through the wood on the table. All cables in and out were accounted for. The E-cat was just lying on the metal frame that was only free-standing on the floor with no cables going to it. The little socket, where the mains cables from the wall connector where connected with the cables to the box and where we had the clamps, was screwed to the wood of the bench but there was no screws going through the metal sheet under the bench. The sheet showed no marks on it under the interesting parts (or elsewhere as I remember it). Of course, if the white little socket was rigged inside and the metal screws was long enough to go just through the wood, touching the metal sheet underneath, then the bench itself could lead current. I do not remember if I actually checked the bench frame for cables connected to it but I probably did. However, I have a close-up picture of the socket and it looks normal and the screws appear to be of normal size. I also have pictures of all the connectors going to the powermeter and of the frame on the floor. I took a picture every day of the connectors and cables to the powermeter in case anyone would tamper with them when we were out.

I lifted the control box to check what was under it and when doing so I tried to measure the weight and it is muck lighter than a car battery. The box itself has a weight, of course, and what is in it can not be much.

All these observations take away a number of ways to tamper with our measurements but there can still be things that we "didn't think of" and that is the reason why we only can claim "indications of" and not "proof of" anomalous heat production. We must have more control over the whole situation before we can talk about proof.

Best regards,
Torbjörn

Additional information for your consideration as follows:

Andrea Rossi

May 24th, 2013 at 4:56 AM

To the Readers:

A friend of mine, Prof. of Electric Measurements , put me a question that I think is important to reproduce here:

” The measurement of the electric energy consumed by the resistance could have been affected by the fact that a particular wave has been produced that the instrument of measurement could have not been able to measure”. This question is important. The answer is: the measurement of the electric energy that has been consumed by the resistances has been made BETWEEN THE PLUG OF THE GRID AND THE CONTROL PANEL, NOT BETWEEN THE CONTROL PANEL AND THE RESISTANCES. Therefore the wave of the electricity in the point in which the electric energy consumed has been measured was a full, regular wave od alternate current ( the instrumentation used allowed also to see the wave form). AGAIN:

THE MEASUREMENT MADE BY THE PCE 830 HAS BEEN TAKEN DIRECTLY FROM THE GRID OF THE OF THE ENERGY DISTRIBUTOR; AFTER THE MEASUREMENT OF ENERGY , THE ENERGY IS ENVOYED TO THE REGULATION SYSTEM ( ANGLE PHASE TRIAC), THEREFORE THE SOLE ENERGY MEASURED IS 380 VOLTS 3 PHASES 50 Hz !!!

Obviously the Examiners wanted to measure the energy consumed between the plug of the grid and the control panel exactly for this reason. This can be also found in the Report.

Warm Regards,

A.R.

great job of doing free promotion and marketing for a bunch of cheats and frauds.

It's déjà vu all over again, and I see two types of pro Rossi posts. Fools and shills. The fun isn't debunking the fake science. The fun is sorting through the various criminal minds perpetrating it and the clueless rubes they inspire to run their bogus "science" around the web. Rossi is a convicted fraud with a history of deception. Another thing to be on the lookout for are the "also rans" trying to bilk off the same ruse. Defkalion immediately comes to mind but they aren't alone.

The secret ingredient to Rossi's E-cat is 90 percent hopium and 10 percent Balonyium.

Enjoy.

axil can't afford to bankroll it himself, so needs more suckers^Winvestors to finish it.

"Well, I am saying it was observed by a group of scientists from Sweden who by all accounts have no vested interest in the device succeeding"

It was observed. That doesn't mean it was tested.

You can observe someone made to disappear from a magic box, but the investigation you're allowed to do on testing the box isn't a trick one is controlled.

In the face of new evidence (relatively credible group of scientists verifying) I think we have to entertain the notion that this is a 62 year old man trying to make up for a scandal ridden life and actually has something.

http://blog.vixra.org/category/crackpots-who-were-right/

I'd be willing to be it's still a fraud, but only to a point. If this were Intrade, I'd go long around 15% that it's real.

Wow, I agree that observation without investigation can mean that this was a magic trick. Only time will tell if Rossi is Houdini or Da Vinci. I know many people here believe he is a charlatan, but if so, he fooled a team of scientists in a 100+ hour test. Imagine if you were Rossi leaving the room to a group of scientists and wondering if they are going to discover that you are a fraud. You are not even in the room to explain, defend or cover up anything. I don't think Houdini ever did that. And they weren't average people off of the street. They were phd scientists who knew they were going to be publishing a paper based on what they saw and measured.

Like the post above I put this at about 15 to 20% being the real deal. If someone wants to call me gullible for putting those odds on it, I am ok with that.

Rossi is simply amazing; we must give the devil his due. Looking past the petty, reactionary, and inconsequential concerns of today and view current events through the widest scope of history, Rossi is an momentous figure of the first order; a hero of epic proportion, an Achilles of science who has been gravely wounded in a gallant battle. But whose resolute fortitude has carried him through. The bards of history will sing the clarion songs of valor and bravery to the latest generation.

For my own perspective, I think we have a responsibility as scientists to tell the public what real science is, what good science is, and whether this recrimination and persecution of one of its greatest heroes is good science or not. (It’s not.) And then, to tell them what good science really looks like, and demand that personality has no place in science. Otherwise and forever, to our greatest jeopardy, baseless prejudice and pride is never worth listening to.

For my own perspective, I think we have a responsibility as scientists to tell the public what real science is, what good science is,

Real science is sharing all the details of your experiment with other scientists so that they can independently test it. Real science is thinking about what other, independent predictions your hypothesized mechanism might imply, so that the hypothesis can be tested robustly via multiple, independent tests (here, for example: predict some other nonradiative nuclear fusion reactions that can be tested in the lab). Real science consists of reproducible principles and mechanisms. Anything less is just another N-ray.

" I know many people here believe he is a charlatan, but if so, he fooled a team of scientists in a 100+ hour test"

With one breath you say "Yes, there wasn't a proper investigation" then the other you say that "there was a proper investigation".

Since there was no allowance for a genuine test, only a confirmation that the items were not figments, there is no call to claim "100+ hours testing".

I agree that is a bit of a misstatement. So I would call it a 100 hour period of observation and measurement. But with that I think the title of this article could be better stated. Instead of it saying "people are still falling for it", it should say "a group of university scientists fell for it".

You test the LENR device as a black box to protect Rossi’s intellectual property rights or you give him patent protection. LENR intellectual property rights cannot be protected by patent. Science has perpetrated this unfair treatment of LENR developers.

Then unjustly science complains… “Real science is sharing all the details of your experiment with other scientists so that they can independently test it.”

What hypocrisy! Sure, give me your trillion dollar idea so I can feel good. These reactionaries say that Rossi does not need to have his rights protected like other people. So Rossi when another way, he bypassed science and financed his ideas with his own money. He will use profit from the sale of his invention to move forward.

It’s all a result of the intolerance for ideas, prejudice, and personality cultism. So reap the fruits of your predation, you scientists of wicked hearts. You will go down in history with those who persecuted Galileo and Copernicus, of Pasteur and Lister, of Darwin and Albert Einstein.

There will be revulsion for this injustice echoing forever down the halls of history.

Okay wow so there is a lot of heated debate.

It's obvious there are many people here like WOW and other handles that literally just heard about Rossi and the ecat and are obviously technically competent and are furious at this being called real science.

But here is the deal, not the scientists who tested it nor Rossi himself insists that this is an officially definitive test. Because it cannot exclude every form of fraud.

Axil said it best. Business is business and science is science. When something new is developed through science one can expect a healthy measure of openness, but when something new is developed through business this is not the case.

If Rossi could secure his invention via a patent he would disclose the secret, but he can't simply do that for many reasons.
1) he does not know why it works so any attempt at a full patent would essentially create a repeatable experiment that would allow everybody to test their theories against it. And once they have the theory a more bulletproof patent can be secured. If you don't believe that, here is proof.

Piantelli actually already has patented prior art that seems to describe everything Rossi is doing except piantelli cannot get the reaction to work reliably. If he could then his company nichenergy would have come out with a product themselves. Piantelli is a respected scientist above suspiscion of fraud.
Example number two another company, DGT, looks like they reproduced a patently different approach AND ARE GETTING SIMILAR REACTIONS. An engineer from NRL indicated in much the same way as these scientists did of Rossi that their reactor was legit up to the point of being frauds. That is their demo showed tons of excess heat at face value. DGT as far as the public knows developed their reactor by examining mass spectroscopy data from Rossi's reactor.
2) he is having trouble patenting around the prior art of piantelli.
As mentioned piantelli, the originator of this technology, has almost all the ingredients except for the catalyzer, whatever that is.
3) it doesn't seem very hard to create this reactor at home yourself if you had the full recipe. Rossi hopes that when he enters the market no one will want to build their own or buy a knockoff because his will be the cheapest way. Disclosing too soon is then a bad idea.

All this is to say that there are plenty of people who are competing with rossi and would jump on any opportunity to get info on his technology. A patent without theory is an open invitation to competition.

However at some point Rossi has to disclose to make money and defend his IP anyway he can through litigation. But when? I pose that question to the readers and then I ask them to see if that is better than what Rossi is trying to do.

So the only question left to answer is why demo at all, why tease? This is where most people decide he is a fraud. I think He has been getting considerable pressure from the scientific community to demo... that's the answer, along with, he likes the attention. Additionally we know it has led to corporate endorsements of sorts and possible corporate partners.

If that's a sign of fraud for you so be it. But understand that in business that's par for the course. Unfortunately for scammers it reads the same way. However for Rossi, who has a criminal background that reads scam artist from the get go, the people he surrounds himself do not let you conclude fraud.

In the end I believe it is most definitely not an obvious fraud and if it is it involves so many different people and institutions of high credibility that it rivals the impossibility of abundant low temperature nuclear reactions itself.

As someone pointed out sometimes crackpots are just right and I believe this is a case for that but every reader should take the time to look into this whole idea about lenrs and make up their own mind because it is much bigger than just Rossi the convict and his ecat.

Some food for thought
LENR-canr.org
http://blog.vixra.org/category/crackpots-who-were-right/

"The measurement of the electric energy consumed by the resistance could have been affected by the fact that a particular wave has been produced that the instrument of measurement could have not been able to measure”. This question is important. The answer is: the measurement of the electric energy that has been consumed by the resistances has been made BETWEEN THE PLUG OF THE GRID AND THE CONTROL PANEL, NOT BETWEEN THE CONTROL PANEL AND THE RESISTANCES."

That all-caps answer doesn't even come close to answering the question. The measurement occurring between the wall plug and the control panel is irrelevant if the extra energy had been added behind the wall plug. The question is about the measuring device's inability to measure certain kinds of electrical energy. The answer is about it measuring somewhere that there could still easily be extra energy that the device still could not measure. It's a non-answer. A sham answer. Like a politician who knows they cannot answer the actual question, so instead they repeat some unrelated talking point and hope idiots think they actually answered.

"are obviously technically competent and are furious at this being called real science."

Sorry, furious? That can only be sourced by projection, kid, there's fuck all evidence in the prose that you have available to draw conclusions from.

And since it isn't science, the claim should not be allowed to stand. However you will use the claim to imply that not only is it "real science" but that those against it are not acting rationally.

This is another example of ad hom. Well done.

"2) he is having trouble patenting around the prior art of piantelli."

Since the patent protection applies once filed for and that a patent must tell everyone how to do whatever it is that is patented, this is merely proof that you don't know what patents are and additional evidence that this is a scam.

"3) it doesn’t seem very hard to create this reactor at home yourself if you had the full recipe."

Nobody does, because it's all been hidden.

You can make a "cold fusion reactor" with a lemon and two pieces of metal. I'd patent it, but there's some issue to prior art in the patent books...

Instead of it saying “people are still falling for it”, it should say “a group of university scientists fell for it”.

1) They are people too.
2) Look at this thread. Are they bots or something?

Re. Eric @ #32: "IMO it is also plausible to assume a very small number of scammers."

In my experience, having looked into the then-current anomalous energy claims over a decade ago:

The majority of people involved in this stuff were "garage inventors" who are honest and making innocent mistakes. They can be educated, though tactfully.

A minority were overt wackos who believe in all manner of magic including their own. Some of them had truly wild stories to tell. Frankly some of them were entertaining in that way. IMHO they should be encouraged to write science fiction, some of them might even be good at it.

And a smaller minority, though they make up for it by being the loudest of the bunch, were scammers of one kind or another. Some of these appeared to be truly convinced that they were within a short distance of The Big Breakthrough, so they overlap with the first category, though I'm considering them as scammers since they were soliciting investor funding.

I'm going to guess that Rossi is one of the latter: a True Believer who can be considered a scammer because he's soliciting money.

To complicate matters slightly, that particular species of True Believer is capable of faking it because 'the real breakthrough" is almost here, and if they can fake it between now and then, they'll save the world and all will be forgiven. The psychology of these people is more complicated than our often over-simplifications would assume, and we need to understand them accurately in order to debunk them effectively.

As for legit LNER research: the US Navy has a small program, and I'm told that at least one of the big Japanese industrial companies does as well. All fine & well, and it's reasonable to keep funding those kinds of programs, with proper standards of accountability in place. Personally I'm more likely to accept a claim of a successful outcome from one of those programs than from some unknown who pops up out of nowhere.

But let's not forget a source of abundant clean baseload power that's remarkably easy to develop: Thorium fission.

By some estimates we have about 400 years' worth of uranium left, assuming reprocessing of spent fuel. But thorium is far more plentiful, and can't be used to make atomic bombs, so we should start using it n-o-w on a global scale. There is exactly no excuse for not going full steam ahead (heh) with thorium fission.

With thorium and renewables, it won't matter if commercial fusion takes another 20 years or 200 years. We can (and should) keep funding the fusion research, but doing so in a manner that removes all pressure for getting commercially viable results in the short term. Then when cost-effective fusion becomes feasible, we can phase it in and phase out the fission reactors, on a schedule that's sound from both an engineering perspective and from a financial perspective.

Re. Eric at 128:

Lucky you, having access to satellites;-)

Here's what I'd suggest for anyone who invents a successful anomalous energy device (hey, we can dream):

Build it into a conventional electric car or renewable energy system on whatever scale (home solar, utility-scale wind, whatever you can get access to).

Make only the claim that it produces improved efficiency, at a price/performance level that is about 14 - 18% better than the competition. This is sufficient to generate quite a bit of business. Deliberately limit the output of the device to produce that level of performance.

After the magic boxes have been in service long enough that it's clear they're performing as specified, secretly upload the software key to let them run at full output. This will create a situation where, for example, electric cars are getting unlimited range with no recharge, and solar systems are showing power output after dark. Let the publicity happen on its own, as the owners of these products start asking what the heck is going on.

Then have a press conference and make the announcement. Yee-haww!

from Gerrit on e-catworld...

interesting follow up on Guglielmi’s blog

>>The only response for which Prof. Essén authorises publication is the following:

“In the intervju I answered that there was no direct measurement of dc (since the clamps could not detec such). This was a bit hasty. In future I will not answer such technical questions without conferring with all coautors. After analysing what we checked and measured (which were many more variables that those from the clamps) we can definitely exclude dc-current. (This is what comes from being nice to journalists.)”<<

So the testers are quite confident that if they have been had by Rossi, it is most likely not due a secret DC current.

@WOW So I guess that blows your whole theory out of the water.
Oh wait these 12 scientists are also in on it too.

@ observer that's any interesting point, well said. I'd add that calling Rossi a convicted criminal is probably over-exxagerating a bit though. Rossi may be dammed to always be surrounded by controversy because his family was rich and he was eccentric but he is also pretty intelligent in the way Edison was. He's a pretty decent experimentalist and technician.

I would also encourage people to not listen to the likes of Wow and CB who are clearly not ubiased and believe whatever their emotions lead them to believe as evidenced by the emotional oubursts when arguing with me, but instead do their own research as I have done.

@WOW 198, your calling this person, observer, a kid. He talks with more emotional control than you do.

Why don't you learn how to separate fact from things that you pull out of nowhere and actually argue his point.

The claim is "indications of anomalous heat."

http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/05/e-cat-tester-torbjorn-hartman-commmen…

So that claim should not stand? Because your "upset."

Listen this is how business discloses things as Observer said, not science. Wake up, your living in the real world.

People are still defending this scammer? How many chances do modern-day charlatans get?

@200

G… I take some sweet pleasure in raining on your dream world by removing thorium power from your future energy hallucinations. LENR will provide the means to produce bombs from U233.

There is a way to defeat the proliferation resistance provided by U232 to U233 and more generally by any alpha emitter nuclear poison through hyper- acceleration of their alpha decay. Yes, this is Low Energy Nuclear Reactions at work.

In this experiment referenced below, the half-life of 232U in the laser field is reduced to 5 microseconds instead of 69 years.

Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation

A.V. Simakin, G.A. Shafeev

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... xT8EcvrwWA

This experiment demonstrates that LENR exists and defines what produces the reaction.

I think you better take the LENR dreamers more seriously before those thorium bombs land on your head before too long.

Once easy access to the nucleus is achieved, all kinds of wild things are possible for good and ill.

This link will work
@207

Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation

arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6276

try again

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1112/1112.6276.pdf

Axil @195 and Observer @196 - I don't know how Italian patents work, but in the US and internationally, once you have applied you are protected. Rossi has applied for both an Italian and international patents. So there's really no excuse for him not sharing his idea.

Also, ironically, it appears the reason he hasn't been granted a patent yet is because a patent must describe the device in reasonable detail, and Rossi didn't do that. Look, if you are unwilling to share your research even in your patent application then I have to say the skepticism you're going to receive is self-inflicted. That verges on paranoia; not even multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical corporations do stuff like that.

Observer:

However at some point Rossi has to disclose to make money and defend his IP anyway he can through litigation. But when?

Keep in mind that LENR claims are now about 25 years old. Whether the engineering problems are overcome or not, its well beyond time they disclose the scientific operating principle in sufficient detail that it can be independently tested.

Since you do not think its an obvious fraud, I'll ask you the same question I asked Axil, plus a follow-up. In Rossi's second-to-last demo, the device contained nat Cu at the end of the run. Now, copper is what Rossi claims this thing produces when it runs - but the isotopic distribution of nat Cu cannot be produced by Ni(p..) reactions. Its physically impossible that this natCu came from fusion. Its also claimed by Rossi that the device did not contain copper to begin with. So, how do you think it got in there? Follow-up: why has Rossi forbidden a similar isotopic analysis of the end products in trials since then?

To me there is one obvious answer to both questions: someone put it in there.

@Observer#196
Hi Obs, just a few observations on some of your points:

"However at some point Rossi has to disclose to make money..."
This is false, as things stand he has taken a lot of money from investors.

"So the only question left to answer is why demo at all, why tease?"
I can think of a few possibilities:
1. To keep current Investors happy.
2. To keep the hype going and gain new Investors.

"I think He has been getting considerable pressure from the scientific community to demo…"
Not really.
The pressure from the Scientific Community has been for him to put up actual evidence and allow actual tests to be done not more 'demos'.

"In the end I believe it is most definitely not an obvious fraud ..."
We have been here before; See "BlackLight Power" for example, they took millions in Investment money made fantastic claims of a new energy source, made a lot of patent applications, that was decades ago and to date they have produced nothing.

I wonder how many more years Rossi will string this out for?

The US patent office has placed a ban on patents covering over unity devices, perpetual motion machines, and inventions based on pseudoscience. LENR inventions have been ban.

Rossi may be doing these tests to provide proof that his device works to support his patent application.

Jo Papp was awarded two patents for the Papp engine when he supplied proof that his engine worked to the US Patent office even though his invention was an over-unity device.

Rossi does not understand how his invention works yet. The LENR engineering problems will be overcome well beyond the time that the scientific operating principles are sufficiently understood in detail.

The LENR process produces transmutation of elements randomly based on the nano-geometry of the system.

The natural copper gambit is a wild goose chase; I suspect that Rossi is using tungsten micro/nano power now in his new high temperature reactor.

I have already provided this thread with references that show random transmutation behavior in Ni/H systems. Obviously, this info has not made an impression.

The scientific principles that LENR is based on is currently well known to science.

It is just a matter of connecting the dots in new ways.

Dr. Kim will lay it all out as I posted above this July.

Rossi has sold his IP to a US company. He has not scam incentive to keep the fraud going, so why do a six month test in the near future?

Rossi needs proof of function to get a patent. The decision to demonstrate function must have been made by the new IP owner in order to get US patent protection. Rossi cannot make business decisions now.

“BlackLight Power” has submitter many patent applications to the US patent office for their LENR process but none have ever been granted. Proof of function is required to get US patent approval for a LENR device.

The US patent office has placed a ban on patents covering over unity devices, perpetual motion machines, and inventions based on pseudoscience. LENR inventions have been ban.

Well, ignoring that your failure to construct a coherent sentence there, this ought to tell you several things.

One of which, in primary place, ought to be that your (or theirs, you never sourced your claim) claim that there were patents holding up disclosure was complete and utter bullshit, wasn't it.

@WOW 198, your calling this person, observer, a kid

Yes, I am. Well done for noticing the words.

Keep up this and you'll pass grade school.

https://register.epo.org/espacenet/application?documentId=EUIP1SP64903F…

Here is the reference you require. Wow, Your manors need some improvement,

@axil#212
"Rossi may be doing these tests to provide proof that his device works to support his patent application."

These demonstrations are not tests.

"Rossi has sold his IP to a US company."

Interesting, which company bought this?

"Rossi needs proof of function to get a patent."

Well if he actually sold his 'tech', then he can't get a patent, as he doesn't own it any more.

Is he involved in this company in any way?

“Rossi has sold his IP to a US company.”

Interesting, which company bought this?

http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/05/rossi-no-longer-controls-e-cat-busine…

So this is an unnamed company in which Rossi is now 'chief scientist'.

And you are sure this company actually exists?

@210 Eric with all do respect there is no guarantee of protection from a patent. It's that simple. Don't take my word for it, do your own research, it does not matter what country.

@210 for the people that have been following this its not even a topic of controversy. Rossi did say he thought it was Ni to Cu that drove the energy most Likely based on the theory that focardi had as evidenced by the many comments Levi made. At that time kullander and Essen were given a single sample to test but when the isotopic ratio of cu came back as natural, Rossi and Focardi did more tests and Rossi later admitted that they were no longer convinced that was the dominant reaction channel. So that was that. But the initial quote survived in the public and as evidenced by you that's what most hear.

The fact is Rossi doesn't know what causes it, nobody does. Extra copper was probably contamination from the copper chamber/pipes he used in the first reactors.

Your second question. Easy, because he didn't want anybody to figure his reactor out before him. DGT is the perfect example. They saw a spectroscopic analysis when they were under contract with Rossi and probably in conjunction with something they knew created another version of the ecat, allegedly since only NRL has publicly tested them in some limited fashion.

It's easy to conclude fraud, in fact for almost anything that is mysterious that's the easy way out. Additionally it's easy to rationalize an outcome you want. It's tough to stay objective, I challenge you to do that, but to do it your gonna have to look more deeply into this bro.

anything else?

Sorry so I should clarify. From the realization that they didn't know what the primary reaction channel was, they stopped allowing anybody to publicly analyze the powder.

Axil @212:

The LENR process produces transmutation of elements randomly based on the nano-geometry of the system.

So it randomly produced copper in the exact isotopic ratios in natural copper?

The natural copper gambit is a wild goose chase; I suspect that Rossi is using tungsten micro/nano power now in his new high temperature reactor

And Observer @222:

when the isotopic ratio of cu came back as natural, Rossi and Focardi did more tests and Rossi later admitted that they were no longer convinced that was the dominant reaction channel. So that was that.

No, that is not that. Saying a different nuclear reaction is what's actually powering the device does not explain how the nat Cu got in there. How did that happen, Observer? We've heard Axil's explanation, I want to hear yours.

Saying its a tungsten reaction makes the problem much much worse, in fact. Now you have to posit that a variety of nuclear fission reactions produced the exact isotopic ratio of natCu with no gammas, no emitted neutrons, and no fission product in the Z=45 area. THAT reaction doesn't just fail to appear in nuclear journals, it fails at the basic math level.

This goes directly back to the issue of irreproducibility. Rossi is hypothesizing non-gamma-emitting, low energy nuclear reactions when a wide variety of elements in the periodic table are hit with protons. Not only is it remarkable that these varied reactions would lead to the exact isotopic ratios given in natural Cu, but given that we know the end state he claims to have gotten (nat Cu), he should be able to hypothesize what reactions are taking place and even some relative cross sections. Just do that. Publish it. Test for those reactions in a laboratory setting without all the engineering rigamarole needed to produce a working power reactor. Just test the science.

Until that's done, and done by a host of mainstream physicists, I will be frankly incredulous that any objective observer could see the unexpected appearance of natural Copper in the device as evidence for reaction rather than a scam. He accidentally and randomly produced Copper via a set of unknown nuclear reactions that precisely match the only isotopic mixture that a scam artist could purchase or produce? Come on guys, listen to yourselves.

I gave you the LENR ash assay from two Ni/H reactors. Did you miss those references?

The copper could have come from contamination of the powder.

The a amount of copper in the DGT ash doubled. Did you pick that up when you looked at the reference I gave you?

Sorry, I meant to say that the amount of nickel doubled.

Your words are cheap it costs you nothing. Investors invest their money and I know how carefully they will test the tech which is claimed to exist and claimed to be operational right now (not in the "near future"). It sets apart this case from academia research (a lot of words, very promising results in the "near future"). Meanwhile Rossi tries to build up the public recognition to secure the priority and associate his name with LENR breakthrough. More skeptical opponents are more glory Rossi will have at the end (if his device actually works). This report dos not validate the technology behind it is "black box" test and it indicates that it performs as claimed. Your words are just words against the actual testing report... as I said very cheap words...

@eric you seem like a reasonably intelligent person but you are coming into the middle of the conversation and acting as if you've heard everything. So just to come to an understanding I've got a masters in optical physics a second masters in quantum optics and I'm a current PhD student research in CM physics, computational methods. I understand particle physics and quantum mechanics pretty well.

I've already told you the cu was likely contamination, I don't have a definitive answer for you, but the real point is that Rossi isn't the only one claiming nuclear reactions without gamas or neutrons, all of LENR is claiming that. And if you can figure out why then you'll get the Nobel prize.

You should get over the Cu talk because a lot of people believe its not that (look up brioullin, the company). brioullin uses Ni and water and some short em pulse and claim to produce everything up to He4.

I agree with the tests you've suggested, look up u of Missouri's skinr program.

@axil if he's using tungsten then wouldn't you expect the patent process to be much easier not having to deal with piantelli s prior art.

@wow, you need a nap. Sound like my three year old. I'm done with you.

@eric there is a current gap between the observations in LENR and the standard model. There are ways you could get gamma and neutron free nuclear physics but it requires for example many body nuclear reaction (see hagelstein, see Kim). You are stuck on high temperature two particle physics and you assumed Ni + p, that's nice but like you said, it fails basic math.

However I'm not saying multi body reactions is the answer either because I don't know how those densities would occur in a metal hydride nor how you would bypass the coulomb issue.

Cheers

@eric and trebor I think if you guys read Ed storms it would resonate with you.

@axil 212

You seem pretty sure of what your saying axil. I don't know how you can be so sure about any theory when it comes to LENR.

"Your words are cheap it costs you nothing. Investors invest their money and I know how carefully they will test the tech which is claimed to exist and claimed to be operational right now (not in the “near future”)."

Oh yeah! Now this is the ultimate argument. Others just don't compare. The test is valid proof even though it can be trivially faked and fooled? No, that has too much merit. How dare you impinge upon these scientists' integrity by suggesting they made the mistakes in controlling for fraud their own report says they made? No, no, too predictable. I need to go for the big lie with this, something that's simply shocking in its audacity.

I know! I'll leverage the investor's well-known prowess at sniffing out and avoiding being bamboozled by bullshit! I'll claim that you could simply never find enough people to invest in a scam device to keep one guy's garage with higher-than-expected electricity bills running, much less to the point of causing tens of billions in losses to fake investments, or trillions in market crashes. It's just impossible!

Sorry some of us have actually seen this kind of thing before -- in "new" energy scams and technology at large -- and there's no other response to that but laughter. Sure there are some investors who really know how to evaluate tech and are careful with their money -- those people are staying the hell away from this.

When real scientists have an extraordinary claim, they listen when other scientists point out the holes in their test procedure, because they want to know if they might have gotten the wrong result, too. "Rebel" science complains about being persecuted and oppressed for speaking the truth. This is why LENR has gone nowhere, and why it so easy allows scam artists like Rossi to operate in their midst.

Observer

@231

I am glad to meet you here. You have the right background to understand this. Few here will be able to. I believe that LENR is and optical based reaction. The polariton is the active agent. Nano-structures are the active geometry.

Reference:

http://www.umich.edu/~mctp/SciPrgPgs/events/2010/MQSS10/Talks/Littlewoo…

Infrared photons cause the electrons in a dipole to tunnel across a properly configured dielectric barrier. A separation of charge is produced with holes on one side of the dielectric barrier and electrons on the other.

Let us take an example…A nano-crack in a metal with two faces or alternatively two nano-particles separated by a few nano-meters can separate electric charge through infrared photon catalyzed dipole vibration with electrons gathering on one side of the crack or nano-particle and electrons on the other face of the crack or the other nano-particle.

The dipole vibrations will eventually sync up with the waves of the infrared photons. In a positive feedback loop, more electron tunneling happens to separate charge than then are destroyed by recombination of holes and electrons because the infrared photons greatly increase electron tunneling across the dielectric barrier. Charge separation happens very fast. The charge separation becomes very large because of the massive electron tunneling that is going on across the dielectric barrier; I guess that means high voltage develops across the dielectric gap.

This reference describes the details of the positive feedback loop:

http://www.np.phy.cam.ac.uk/uploads/2013/prb13-mcavbistability.pdf

Here is how infrared photons increase the tunneling of electrons across a dielectric barrier.

“Using the coherent coupling of light and matter to alter the
tunneling properties of electrons was first discussed during
the 1960s when it was established that photons can optically
excite an electron across an insulating gap between two
superconductors.1 As growth methods for nano- and mesoscale solid-state structures improved, schemes for photon-assisted tunneling (PAT) quickly developed. The oscillating electric field of a resonant photon modulates the local potential of an electronic state to modify its tunneling properties. Radiation applied to quantum wells or quantum dots dresses the electron energy levels, resulting in the emergence of Floquet states. The resulting ladder of dressed states above and below the original energy provides new paths through which the electrons can tunnel.3–6”

More infrared photons produce more tunneling and associated charge separation.

But the dipoles are also made coherent by the infrared photons. This is how highly ionized atoms (holes) can form a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) at very high temperatures.
Extreme charge separation of the dipoles separated by a large dielectric gap causes screening of the coulomb barrier in the holes (atoms mostly stripped of their electrons by intense tunneling across the dielectric barrier).

It is just amazing, but it looks like LENR in the Ni/H is an optical based reaction. A laser is not required to supply the photons to activate this Nanoplasmonic reaction, the infrared photons in a hot Ni/H reactor is what drives the formation of the BEC in that system. Such a BEC can exist at temperatures up to 2300C.

There seems to be a direct relationship between the intensity of the infrared photon flux in a Ni/H reactor and the power and extent of BEC formation.

This photon based BEC mechanism is an established physical reality, universally recognized throughout science. It is a waste of time to dispute its existence. The optics professors are teaching it in class.

This reference indicates how it all works:

Reference:

http://www.umich.edu/~mctp/SciPrgPgs/events/2010/MQSS10/Talks/Littlewoo…

This reference shows the metronome demo which illustrates the BEC principle. This slideshow seems to be a tutorial on BEC caused by excitonic matter.

I don’t understand it all, but I think I have the gist of it now.

On page 6, the slideshow introduces the metronome idea.

This video illustrates the mechanism of coherence development in a vibratory system (dipoles) using a collection of metronomes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JWToUATLGzs

Increase in electron tunneling forced by the infrared photons generates a positive feedback loop inducing huge charge separation.

It is also amazing, how strong that the charge separation can get. Terawatt power level concentrations can be produced. See “hot spots in Nanoplasmonics.

I have some more research to do, to properly understand this power accumulation process, but I think I are on the right scent.

This stuff is most strange, new, and unusual and feel free to pose questions or reactions that will help us all make progress in understanding LENR.

I feel certain that this idea is supportive of Dr. Kim’s BEC theory and is what Dr. Kim needs to complete his BEC theory of LENR.

I am certain about it because it all fits.

"I’ve already told you the cu was likely contamination"

10% Cu contamination of something that was supposed to be pure nickel is extremely bad. If the manufacturing can be THAT lax and the device still "works", it's extremely hard to see how some obscure lattice effect or whatever could make fusion occur so easily without it being apparent in cases all over the place.

"Rossi isn’t the only one claiming nuclear reactions without gamas or neutrons, all of LENR is claiming that. And if you can figure out why then you’ll get the Nobel prize."

That depends on whether you're figuring out a testable (and subsequently verified) hypothesis for how actually works, or just figuring out how a bunch of people managed to fool themselves into seeing an effect that wasn't there. The latter is surely a useful contribution, but not something Nobel prizes are given out for.

“Rossi isn’t the only one claiming nuclear reactions without gamas or neutrons, all of LENR is claiming that. And if you can figure out why then you’ll get the Nobel prize.”

This is old stuff

Any nuclear reaction that produces a gamma that occurs in a BEC will undergo frequency reduction based on the super-atom formula

Gamma frequency = Square root(Number of BEC atoms)(Thermalized frequency)

The frequency of the gamma will be shared by N BEC member atoms.

Do I get a prize?

In post 233, the sentence should read as follows:

Let us take an example…A nano-crack in a metal with two faces or alternatively two nano-particles separated by a few nano-meters can separate electric charge through infrared photon catalyzed dipole vibration with holes gathering on one side of the crack or nano-particle and electrons on the other face of the crack or the other nano-particle.

"Your words are cheap it costs you nothing. Investors invest their money and I know how carefully they will test the tech which is claimed to exist and claimed"

Nope, investors are spending SOMEONE ELSE'S money. And 90% of VC ventures fail in the first three years.

So your thesis is already off to a bad start.

Talk is cheap. Invest your life savings and remortgage if you believe in it so much.

Just a few observations:

James Randi was fond of saying that scientists were often easier to fool than the general public when it came to certain types of "woo." They simply weren't used to looking for active deception. They also underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion.

I think the the wave shape and magnitude coming into the device needs to be established. That is essential before you can make ANY claims as to what the device is doing and any competent EE can establish that for you very easily. If Rossi does not do this then there is no reason to discuss things further. And the test needs to be set up by someone other than one of his flunkies.

Rossi strikes me as being to fusion what Al Gore is to climatology. You look at some data that is inconclusive where there may be some effect at the margins and then blow it up out of all proportion. Gore was just smart enough to pick a scam that was essentially untestable since the size, time periods and number of variables needed to get a definitive proof are obviously not something we are going to see in our lifetimes. But he still got filthy, stinking rich from it. That path does not seem to be open to Rossi outside of his device actually working.

It is always best to pick scams where you can succeed regardless of the veracity of what you are claiming.

Dear Ethan.

The scientists performing the tests of whether their was evidence to support Andrea Rossi's claim to have produced Excess Heat have answered some if not all of your quibbles.

Hidden Wires were looked for and the possibility of a DC source running along the AC wire circuit was accounted for. The initial report from Hanno Essen concurred that the DC powering was possible and that a future test should exclude that, Hanno Essen has now corrected this statement with a latter statement: translated and supplied by Jed Rothwell in reply to and open letter by Dr. Alessio Guglielmi here
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ethics-of-e-cat.html?show…

in summary it states that other members of the scientific test team were looking for just such an attempt to defraud them, using such methods and had run checks to prevent such a fraud along with checking for hidden wires.

There is more information here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg81450.html

Kind Regards walker

Wow,

Why does it seem that everyone with a "get rich quick" scheme spends all their time and effort trying to sell it to others instead of using it themselves to get rich? Rhetorical question, of course.

"The fact is Rossi doesn’t know what causes it"

Interesting, Rossi has several times claimed he knows exactly what is happening.

Here is what he said in response to a question :
"The nature of the process, after years of tests I made, are now well known to me, and there are no reasons to emit neutrons, high energy photons. The shielding has been perfectly calculated, also with the help of Sergio Focardi. The measurements of radiations have always been made by experts, who usually check the radiations in all the sites where they can be produced (cyclotrones, Hospitals, and so forth)."

"Extra copper was probably contamination from the copper chamber/pipes he used in the first reactors."

And yet he stated that this is impossible:
"Cu cannot enter the reactor: Cu is what the water tube is made of, inside the water tube there is the reactor, which is tightly sealed."

@eric#224
"So it randomly produced copper in the exact isotopic ratios in natural copper?"

Rossi has claimed in the past that they enrich the Nickel (somehow in a super secret cheap process), and that this is why the copper residue matches natural copper.

Axil @225:

The copper could have come from contamination of the powder.

The a amount of copper in the DGT ash doubled. Did you pick that up when you looked at the reference I gave you?

See, this is the sort of defense that is likely to make your critics more skeptical rather than less. In the span of two sentences in the same post, you just offered two mutually contradictory explanations for the presence of Cu. Your first sentence implies it was all there to begin with. Your next sentence implies at least some of it was a reaction product. "My client has an alibi, besides, it was self-defense" may work for lawyers, but its really terrible science.

Observer @229:

You are stuck on high temperature two particle physics and you assumed Ni + p, that’s nice but like you said, it fails basic math.

No, I said the proposed tungsten reaction fails basic math - because its a fission where they're claiming to have seen one of the products in macroscopic amounts but not the other. The initially proposed nickle reaction's issues are that Ni(p...) type reactions would produce stable Cu (-63 and -65) in different istopic ratios than natural Cu, plus because Ni has more stable isotopes than Cu the reactions would produce a lot of unstable Cu which would decay (not seen) to Ni in different isotopic ratios than seen in nature (not seen).

Of course by claiming the copper is contaminant and not a reaction product at all, you eliminate these issues. Now you merely have to explain why your nuclear reaction didn't produce detectable end products!!! And also why Rossi won't let independent scientists tests for those end products.

(Plus, as self-incriminating points out, you now have to explain how this machine with eyebrow-raisingly lax engineering standards lead to a reaction never seen in systems with far more stringent engineering standards. Ironically, claiming its a contaminant should mean that reproducibility would be incredibly easy to achieve, because evidently the matrix undergoing the reaction(s) isn't that sensitive to contamination now, is it?)

Rossi has claimed in the past that they enrich the Nickel (somehow in a super secret cheap process), and that this is why the copper residue matches natural copper.

So, he enriched it to the precise ratios needed to make the expected fusion products identical to what a scam would yield. Ahhhh, that explains everything!

@Observer
"...but the real point is that Rossi isn’t the only one claiming nuclear reactions without gamas or neutrons"

It is odd reading the many statements of Rossi.
Because he has both claimed that gamma radiation has been produced and claimed that it isn't.

For example he stated on his blog :
"We produce gamma rays, and our energy comes from their thermalization."

He also stated:
"Yes, we measured gamma rays inside the E-Cats: are such gamma rays to heat the water."

@244

When the Ni/H reactor is cold, gammas may well be produced because a global condition of QM entanglement has not yet been established.

If you watched the metronome video, you will see that a period of time is requires to sync up all the vibrations throughout the system.

When the reactor is cold, gammas could be produced for a short time until it heats up enough for global entanglement to establish itself.

Ian Walker, that is the same ridiculous non-explanation someone already posted.

"Hey, you know how I said that we couldn't detect DC currents, because our actual experimental setup could not detect DC currents? Well I asked around and one of the guys said they totally checked for DC currents. So we good?"

No, we aren't. How did they check?

Were they measuring DC current during the actual test? If so why was this not given as part of their experimental setup? Why was this not in the paper?

If they "checked" for DC current prior to starting the test then that means precisely nothing and the original statement was correct.

Also there's nothing in the quote about checking for other possible sources of fraud, only the statement about measuring DC current. The rest is your pure fabrication.

It was a BS CYA statement of no meaning. If you thinking you're helping by piling on the BS, then good job! I can only hope you're being paid for it.

So just to be clear, axil, you're saying that Rossi is wrong that thermalization of gamma rays is how they actually produce power and instead it's the thermalization of something else? What?

Also, you're saying that you COULD detect gamma rays coming from one of these devices when it's "cold", and nuclear reactions are occurring but apparently different ones? Well gee seems like that should be pretty easy to put to the test!

Oh sorry Ian I'm not quite done piling on:

Essen's statement expects us to believe that they DID actually think of accounting for sources of bias and underestimation of input power, but didn't think anyone else would care that their test was valid so why bother putting it in the paper? "Obviously we have to account for fraud, but let's not tell people how we accounted for fraud." -- that's the reasoning I'm expected to buy?

Okay! It's pretty bad when your cover story is "Yeah, we're not that good at this 'science' thing."

@247

See post 62

So the approach we’ve taken is that we’ve said “the only conceivable route for making sense of these observations at all, is that the big energy quanta have to get sliced and diced up into a very very large number if much smaller energy quanta.” The much larger number is on the order of several hundred million. In NMR physics and optical physics, people are familiar with breaking up a large quantum into perhaps 30 smaller pieces, you could argue that there are some experiments where you could argue that maybe that numbers as high as 100 or so. It’s unprecedented that you could take an MeV quantum and chop it up into bite sized pieces that are 10s of meV.”

One gamma ray is equal to many infrared rays.

"One gamma ray is equal to many infrared rays."

Indeed it is. And since "slicing an energy quanta" is not a thing (it's a quanta), that leaves absorption and re-emission as infrared. But there's not nearly enough material to absorb a significant amount of gamma. So there should be detectable gamma emissions during the phase in which you said there would be gamma emissions.

Of course this is straying off topic. Whether some OTHER allegedly LENR-based experiment could be valid and show meaningful, positive results is an interesting, open question. Whether THIS experiment was valid and actually demonstrated the result being claimed is not. You can argue that Rossi doesn't know how his own device works, but that's irrelevant until we know that it does work.

Which I'm sure Rossi knows. But somehow this test failed to determine. Weird!

Axil @246

When the Ni/H reactor is cold, gammas may well be produced because a global condition of QM entanglement has not yet been established.

#1. So reproduce this more standard nuclear reaction on the bench top, absent the power-production engineering. Just the reaction, as it were: use the absolutely minimalist expermental set-up you can design. Show us these gammas on start up.

Why doesn't the LENR do that? It can't be the trade secret issue because nobody is asking you to demonstrate the safe cold fusion that is going to earn the big bucks; you've now just claimed that folks like Rossi can produce regular hot nuclear reactions on a bench top (as a precursor to the cold reactions). So do those.

#2. Wait, you said above that Ni/H wasn't the reaction at all - you said that Cu was a contaminant (@225) and that you suspect tungsten was the element undergoing the nuclear reaction (@212). Which is it? Full disclosure; I'm going to suggest you do #1 (and ask why you don't) regardless of what elements you say are undergoing fusion.

@ 252

I say that a verity of metals can support dipole formation on the surface of their associated micro/nano-powders. Nickel is best because its supports the most vigorous dipole activity.

Even Copper can support LENR. The wide range of transmuted elements in the LENR ash reflects the fact that most material will support the dipole formation process. Transmutation occurs multiple times in a series of fission and fusion reactions in a vide mix of materials as these materials change and change again over and over.

The key to the LENR reaction is the size distribution of the micro/nano particles in the reaction chain.

Experimentally measuring hot spot energy concentration.
In a seminal Nanoplasmonics paper, the ability of hot spots to concentrate power is experimentally determined for the first time.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ca…
Structure Enhancement Factor Relationships in Single Gold Nanoantennas by Surface-Enhanced Raman Excitation Spectroscopy

Some select nanoparticle configurations (called nanoantenna in the parlance of Nanoplasmonics) can concentrate and amplify incoming EMF from a laser by a factor of 500,000,000 in the near infrared range to a sub-nano-sized region that we have been calling a hot spot.

Even though the enhancement factors obtained are mind blowing, they are far from the maximum’s that might eventually be reached.

The gap between two nanowires (called nanoantenna) measuring at or under .5 NM can concentrate an EMF field by a factor of 10 to the 15 power.

The Ni/H reactor produces EMF enchantments by additional orders of magnitude which get the EMF enhancement in to the trillions and beyond.

This ability to concentrate EMF quantified in experiments exceeds quantum mechanical predictions by a factor of 3. This can result in an EMF singularity limited only by electron tunneling through the dielectric gap.

The size of the gap that can be spanned by tunneling is proportional to the energy of the free electrons on the surface of the micro-particles. Special Relativity shows that the mass of an object appears to increase as its speed v (relative to the rest frame) increases. Higher energy electrons gain mass with speed. Heavier electrons can support larger hot spot dielectric gaps, which mean higher EMF confinement from surface plasmoids.

One of the most commonly found and widely exploded hot spots in Nanoplasmonics is due to the lightning rod effect, a nonresonant enhancement that generates a high local field at the point of a sharp tip.

As stated in the study, the experimental techniques used there were at a disadvantage in maximizing concentration and associated enhancement of EMF for a couple of reasons.

First, laser excitation of the nanoparticles is poor at producing the resonance pattern that generates the most enhancements. From the document, it states.

“A dipole within the near-field of the nanoparticles allows for excitation of plasmon resonances, which are difficult to excite with plane wave irradiation.”

A laser produces plane wave irradiation only; on the other hand, dipole excitation will really get the enhancement rolling. The only way that the experimenters got the enhancement up to as high as it eventually got was to produce secondary excitement using the laser to pump up a dipole emitter close to the hot spot.

Another problem for the experimenters was that the enhancement is most powerful at longer wavelengths into the deeper infrared than the experimenters could produce. The lasers used by the experimenter could not get that deep into the infrared.

The most enhancements came from nanoparticles that were connected by a sub Nano scale solid connection between the nanoparticles.

When there is some space between the particles, power is broadcast like a radio station to far places. This is called far field radiation.

When the particles were connected by a thin channel of material, a resonance process forces all the EMF into the ultra-small region between the nanoparticles. This is called near field radiation.

The most powerful nano-particles emitters look like a dumbbell with the thinnest possible thread of solid material to connect them.

We can see that a highly entangled nanowire system of micro-particles which typifies a Ni/H reactor is an ideal engineering application of this research.

Axil, your answer was utterly nonresponsive to my point #1. You claimed in @246 that these reactions can produce gammas on start-up, so I asked why you don't show a reaction that produces gammas. Its a very simple request.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ca…

From this experiment, you will see a relationship between heat production and radiation production.

Heat and gamma production are mutually excusive.

@Axil nice to meet you as well

that is an interesting hypothesis.

Gamma frequency = Square root(Number of BEC atoms)(Thermalized frequency)"

Have you got some reference that shows this is related to LENR? Is this part of the Kim and/or Hagelstein hypothesis?

@ Self 10% of an already small amount is a trace amount. You could draw whatever conclusion you want

@Trebor and Eric in interview after interview he changes his mind about what he thinks causes it. Rossi is not qualified to figure the reaction out. I think he likes to think he knows but he doesn't. Ultimately only a few people know the intricacies of the reaction and everybody is left to speculate.
I think Rossi repeats what Focardi is thinking at the time. That's my guess. Anyways he never goes into full detail on the process for "proprietary reasons."

I'd concentrate on what Focardi , Levi, Hadjichristos, Hagelstein, Ed Storm and specially, Piantelli think, they probably have the best first hand knowledge of an actual reaction and are the most qualified to speculate.

Also there are so many theories. For example Hagelstein believes in the splitting of quanta but doesn't know how. Kim thinks it's a form of BEC and coulomb screening along with quanta splitting. DGT thinks Rydberg Hydrogen interacts with something like rutile Ni(II)Fl. Rossi's latest explanation is somekind of hydrogen squeezing effect as far as I can tell. Brioullin thinks the Ni matrix is just a catalyst and the hydrogen fuses up all the way to He4 (that's straight cold fusion). Miley thinks it's some type of vacancy stuffed with H or D that induces some form of fusion nobody has yet seen probably though an intermediary exotic quasi-particle. Ed Storms thinks its special cracks/deformities in the Ni/Pd along with some coherent oscillations. Widom and Larsen believe SPPs create heavy electrons that form Neutrons that eventually are captured by the Nickel and transmute. There are probably more. Axil seems to have a theory that is a combination of WL/Kim/Hagelstein/Storms.

Everybody has a theory. And in all the theories they seem to fail to reconcile the standard model fully, and account for the lack of expected levels of Gammas, Neutrons, etc.

I tend to agree with Axil that something like Hagelsteins theory is at play in order to avoid unlikely and unseen new particles.

@eric 252 I thought LENR was bunk and Rossi a clear fraud so why are you proposing new experiments?

@Axil 246 heating up and global entaglement are two concepts that are kind of hard to reconcile.

Regarding the circuit shown in the figure marked "power magic:" this would not work. The researchers measured voltage. To do this, they had to strip the wires leading into the machine. If there were two wires under the insulation, they would notice that. Or if they did notice it, the wires would short circuit as soon as the device went into the pretend "OFF" cycle. Furthermore, they would see that the voltage does not drop to zero, so they would know the power is not off.

This has not been carefully thought through.

All of the other technical objections in this post are flawed, but I do not have the time or the will to correct them.

I would also note that cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times in hundreds of major labs, often at high signal to noise ratios, and these replications have been published in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. You will find a bibliography and many papers here:

http://lenr-canr.org/

If all of these replications were mistaken or fraudulent, the scientific method itself would not work, and we would still be living in caves. Never, in the history of science, has this method failed. Despite assertions to the contrary, things like polywater were never reported to be replicated, except in a few instances. These instances were thought to be at very low s/n ratios. They were soon retracted. The experimental scientific method works. Replication and peer-review work. Those who claim that cold fusion does not exist turn their back on these method.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.2264v3.pdf

ENTANGLEMENT THRESHOLDS FOR RANDOM INDUCED STATES

This paper states, in a large system of entangled particles, after you pass the threshold, the whole system will become entangled.

Next:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Hubbard_model

If you are a stickler for detail, the Bose–Hubbard model gives an approximate description of the physics of interacting bosons on a lattice. It is closely related to the Hubbard model which originated in solid-state physics as an approximate description of superconducting systems and the motion of electrons between the atoms of a crystalline solid. The name Bose refers to the fact that the particles in the system are bosonic. Remember that the dipole is a boson with spin 1.

This model is the same one that is used for cold atoms confined in an optical lattice (aka cooled by a laser) with appropriate theoretical adjustments.

Since dipoles and super cooled atoms follow the same model, they behave alike in important ways; they can both form Bose-Einstein condensates.

Let us now roll in another quantum optics model: The Jaynes–Cummings model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaynes%E2%80%93Cummings_model

Starting at the very bottom, the most basic underlying model that teaches us how waves/particles can resonate is the Jaynes–Cummings model (JCM). It describes the system of a two-level atom interacting with a quantized mode of an optical cavity, with or without the presence of light (in the form of a bath of electromagnetic radiation that can cause spontaneous emission and absorption).

Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard (JCH) model

Next we move on to the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard (JCH) model. Because there are millions of these hot-spots covering the combined surfaces of all the micro-particles, the JCH model is a combination of the Jaynes–Cummings model and the coupled cavities. The one-dimensional JCH model consists of a chain of N-coupled single-mode cavities and each cavity contains two-level atoms.

The tunneling effect comes from the junction between cavities which are an analogy of the Josephson Effect.

The eigenstates of the JCH Hamiltonian in the two-excitation subspace for the N-cavity system are examined in current nano research. This research focuses on the existence of bound states as well as their features. It is interesting to note that two repulsive bosonic atoms can form a bound pair in an optical lattice. By analogy, the same will be true for polaritons.

The JCH Hamiltonian also supports two-polariton bound states when the photon-atom interaction is sufficiently strong.

In the LENR case, the coupling between photons and dipoles are very strong. In particular, the two polaritons associated with the bound states exhibit a strong correlation such that they stay close to each other in position space. The results discussed have been published in "Two-polariton bound states in the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model".

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.1366v1

If you’re up to it, the analytic solution of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors in the strong coupling regime is also developed in this paper. The time evolution of such a system is also considered for the cases of different initial conditions.

@256

This paper shows how energy is shared among atoms in a BEC.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0710.5622

Rydberg excitation of Bose-Einstein condensates

See page three.

Connecting two dots, A high temperature BEC will distribute large gamma quanta’s.

Axil:

Heat and gamma production are mutually excusive.

This is so aggravating. Look, YOU said that these devices produce gammas when they start up. Are you retracting that claim? If not, why not demonstrate it?

I did not ask for a working thermal power source. In fact I explicitly said you LENR folk should leave all the engineering required for that aside and just demonstrate the tabletop production of gammas by the simplest, most stripped-down version of the device possible. Tell me why you LENR folks won't do this. This should be appealing to you because the less of the power-production engineering that's in the test device, the better your money-making secrets are protected. So you should be actively in favor of tests like this.

Observer:

@Trebor and Eric in interview after interview he changes his mind about what he thinks causes it. Rossi is not qualified to figure the reaction out.

Doesn't really matter. If its a real effect then he could patent the device and then describe the device to the scientific community so that others will be able to replicate it, right?

Observer:

@eric 252 I thought LENR was bunk and Rossi a clear fraud so why are you proposing new experiments?

IMO its still up to the LENR proposers to demonstrate their effect; what I'm doing here is suggesting experiment ideas that they can use which might help convince skeptics.

You're right, at this stage I'm not suggesting experiment ideas that mainstream scientists could perform. I couldn't make such a suggestion, because Rossi won't describe his experimental setup in sufficient detail in the open literature that anyone else could do the experiment, even if they wanted to.
If he wants other people to confirm his results, he's going to have to share the details of the machine he wants those other people to build. Its that simple, isn't it?

This is my last attempt to satisfy eric as follows:

The LENR reaction is coupled to the gamma thermalization reaction to a major extent except for a small but controllable window of temperature. If the lattice is hot enough then no gammas are produced.

To go over some history again, when Rossi first started his demonstrations and the public comments about them, his first few shows were marred by a troublesome condition during startup and shutdown where significant gamma radiation was produced.

If you remember, Celani said about the January 14 demo as follows:

“After various vicissitudes, because the reactor was having major problems, some inner resistors had broken down; Mr. Rossi came out of the room delighted: "The reactor has started". Before he came out, a few minutes before, I had independently measured that both the gamma detector and the mini Geiger had hit the top of the scale, whereas the two detectors of electromagnetic interference were not showing anything.”

This meant that a short but intense emission of gamma radiation had taken place.

But while the reactor was in operation, at the demonstration on January 14, no measurable nuclear radiation was detected. Villa wrote:

“The energy power input and output and gamma radiations were measured before, during and after the active phase of the system, as well as the hydrogen consumption. While a net energy output was observed, no γ excess (with energy above 200 keV has been measured above the natural background level (<180 Hz rate in single mode, compared to an expected rate largely in excess of 1 MHz).”

Rossi eventually fixed this problem by getting his reactor up to operating temperature before startup by using a secondary heater.

I found the full Celani quote for Eric as follows:

Celani

Before the experiment began, without others realizing it, I ran some checks to make sure, in the first place, that there were no radioactive sources hidden somewhere in the reactor. Secondly, that there were no generators of powerful electromagnetic interference capable of jamming electronic instruments; Thirdly, that there were no massive power cables around, capable of simulating a power excess with nothing but a 10 kW water boiler. I ran these checks without Rossi’s knowledge and everything seemed OK. At a certain point Rossi said he was about to begin the experiment. I then decided to use the gamma-spectrometer (which is battery-operated as well) without the power cable, because if there is any electromagnetic interference, this may be carried through the ground wire, and can alter the measurement. Everything was working: a battery powered mini-Geiger counter, a microwave detector, also battery powered, and an ELF detector, battery powered as well. Therefore, four independent instruments, all battery powered. After various vicissitudes, because the reactor was having major problems, some inner resistors had broken down, Mr. Rossi came out of the room delighted: “The reactor has started.” Before he came out, a few minutes before, I had independently measured that both the gamma detector and the mini-Geiger counter had hit the top of the scale, whereas the two detectors of electromagnetic interference were not showing anything. This meant that a short but intense emission of gamma radiation had taken place. Afterwards, everything was back to normal, and we stayed in the hall to see what was happening. After about half an hour, I don’t recall the time exactly, I was allowed to go and take a look at the working reactor with my portable detector set for gamma count, and I began to perform a check. I noticed that there was an increase of total gamma radiation compared to the amount recorded before the beginning of the experiment, not a dangerous increase, around 50%. And, most important, it wasn’t a stable increase, rather a very, very unstable one. This means that there was something live inside, changing the emission, the feeble emission of gammas.

Here is the build instructions for the Pirelli High school reactor. I like this reactor and it is open source. If you want a LENR reactor, build it.

The school claims a COP of 4

http://22passi.blogspot.de/2012/04/lathanor-delliis-pirelli-di-roma-1.h…

The Ugo Abundo, coordinator of the group of teachers who, together with the students of the IIS Pirelli of Rome, has made a cell "cold fusion" with an estimated yield of 400% (COP 4), sent me over the course of the night following text, which I quoted here in full (except for slight changes for better usability on the web) and also made downloadable as pdf ( download ). These are the directions for the construction of the cell "Athanor", by professionals with appropriate skills, in the presence of all necessary equipment and in compliance with all safety rules recommended.

I remember that the cell is covered by a patent application "defensive", and that the IIS Pirelli has decided to make generally available the "open-source" specifications for its construction and testing; email below, after the preliminary yesterday ( here ), is the first real step in this direction.

Build directions in English:

http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/04/english-translation-of-build-instruct…

Axil @ 263

" Before he came out, a few minutes before, I had independently measured that both the gamma detector and the mini-Geiger counter had hit the top of the scale, whereas the two detectors of electromagnetic interference were not showing anything. This meant that a short but intense emission of gamma radiation had taken place. "

Darn. Poor Celani is going to die. Actually, not, but it would be nice if Rossi and followers make a decision on whether gamma rays are, or not, emitted from the Hot/Cold/Mild Cat.

This feline has an identity issue...

"because Rossi won’t describe his experimental setup in sufficient detail in the open literature that anyone else could do the experiment, even if they wanted to."

And that's because he saw what happened when Pons & Fleischmann gave enough information for others to recreate their cold fusion proof: they were shown to be wrong.

Which is devastating to their case for VC funding...

Axil,
Perhaps you will think me too much of a grump when I say that an anecdotal account of someone going behind the experimentor's back to wave a geiger counter at his equipment when he wasn't looking isn't what I meant by an independent test of the gamma production. But sadly, I am that grump.

I'd like to see a more formal experiment, with a stripped-down or modified version of the device designed to reproduce this sudden burst of hot fusion as the machine ramps up. It doesn't have to produce power. It doesn't have to convert the excess energy from a single reaction into millions of long-wavelength photons as you claim the working reactor does. Frankly, its probably better for independent confirmation if it doesn't; if you can just keep the device operating in this ramp-up mode. I'd like to see the test results published in the literature. Ideally, I'd like to see non-LENR scientiists involved in the experiment or at least have access to experimental setup, as there needs to be someone checing whether the gammas are from a reaction vs.background noise vs. some internal source vs. high energy x-rays that might be produced from a vacuum tube. (And for the record, I'm not accusing Rossi of planting either of the last two items; I don't think he did. Celani's story could easily be explained via setting the sensitivity high and seeing a variation in background noise. Handhelds are great for the job they are intended to do, but that's not reaction characterizaton.)

Look, you guys have spent 20 years looking at thermal signals. Given how much time you've already invested, IMO it would be a wise investment of your future time to spend a year or two doing what every nuclear scientist on the planet has requested you do since the beginning: show the practically unmistakeable signatures of a nuclear fusion reaction, namely, neutron and gamma flux. Under controlled conditions, and using an experimental set-up that is open to reproduction.

It fails for the same reason it would fail in a court: it's hearsay evidence.

"I totally DID look, honest!".

It isn't evidence.

Jed Rothwell, where are you getting all that? It's not in the paper. You say "The researchers measured voltage. To do this, they had to strip the wires" -- so is this coming from some other source, or are you just inferring that they must have done this because they measured the voltage? On the forum Ian Walker linked to, before you (re-)posted Essen's "explanation", you were actually making the excuse that it's not possible to test for ever single last variable -- like DC current, that was actually your example -- in one test. Then you quoted Essen saying they did check. So I don't think you're introducing special knowledge here, I think you're speculating on their behalf.

Well that's nice that you'd use your imagination to fill in the blanks in the scammer's scam for them (many scams depend on this, though in this one it just helps) but it's useless because it's still speculation and wrong to boot.

You don't have to strip wires to measure voltage, you just need a Hall effect meter that can measure it. If you were allowed to mess with the setup to the point of stripping wires, why not just unplug the damn thing from the wall and measure in-line, removing all possible doubt about hidden conductors?

What did they measure the voltage with? Was it able to measure DC voltage/current? What about other frequencies of AC outside the one they were told was being used? Why was this not specified in the report? If they were measuring the voltage continuously during the test and recording the data, why was this not mentioned in the report? If they weren't, then it's meaningless.

You know, beyond just being post-hoc speculative spackle for the holes in their story.

If their test was valid, there is no reason why their paper would not have described a valid test. It did not. It was not.

There is no conceivable reason why they would have actually thought of all these methods of fraud, tested for all these methods of fraud, and then NOT reported on how they did this testing in a paper that is supposed to convince others that the test results, and thus the device, are real.

But like a grieving widow talking to a medium, you WANT to believe so you do their work for them, filling in all the holes in their stories rather than recognizing them as holes.

That's nice, but why you think anyone else should be convinced is beyond me.

@G #201 I agree G if your going to demo something in a closed loop AND YOU CAN SOMEHOW GET AWAY FROM SKEPTICS CALLING IT FRAUD ANYWAY, then it's better than the extremely simple test that these scientists performed.

But as you might guess, the more wires and machines you put in the way the more the skeptics will find fault with it.

So in the end only independent replication from a set of instructions OR going to home depot and buying one will prove it beyond doubt. Since as a business you'd have to be stupid to give the IP away without protection (no an NDA is not protection, its a deterrent with risk).

Rossi is simply balancing risk vs reward.

"no an NDA is not protection"

Yes it is.

"its a deterrent with risk"

That's all patent protection is. And the deterrent in that case

a) is paid for by the open disclosure of everything you invented in the patent
b) ends after 20 years by statute (unlike an NDA)

LCD:

the more wires and machines you put in the way the more the skeptics will find fault with it....

...Since as a business you’d have to be stupid to give the IP away without protection (no an NDA is not protection, its a deterrent with risk).

Rossi is simply balancing risk vs reward.

Of course, there's a way to address both problems simultaneously: develop an experimental set-up that demonstrates the key scientific claim (fusion at particle excitations well below what you'd need to overcome the coulomb barrier) but leaves out all the engineering required to turn it into a power source. The skeptics are happy with a simpler set-up and the inventors have protected the money-making parts of their invention. One wonders why, after 20 years, they haven't done that.

And, as Wow points out, all patents are deterrents with risk. If that's the argument against using NDAs to let critics see the equipment, its a really bad one.

@Eric 261 Yes it is. But blackbox testing is scientifically acceptable too, isn't it?

"But as you might guess, the more wires and machines you put in the way the more the skeptics will find fault with it.

So in the end only independent replication from a set of instructions OR going to home depot and buying one will prove it beyond doubt. "

Bollocks and tripe.

If you put in the necessary devices to actually test the device properly, then skeptics will find LESS fault because there will be less fault to find.

Demonstrating that the device works is simple and requires no exposure of IP what-so-ever:

Have an actual skeptical team test the device in an independent location as a black-box, accounting for ALL input energy with an in-line resistive measurement. Let the skeptics control for possible sources of error/fraud, and if they still find the result, they will be convinced. This is not complex. It's actually extremely simple.

And it hasn't happened yet. And I'll bet you my spare kidney it never does. Because you're all being taken for a ride. Rossi does NOT want a test, he wants a "demo" as you call it. Because a real test would reveal the truth that he has nothing, while "demos" can string along gullible VCs for a long, long time.

@ axil 262

“After various vicissitudes, because the reactor was having major problems, some inner resistors had broken down; Mr. Rossi came out of the room delighted: “The reactor has started”. Before he came out, a few minutes before, I had independently measured that both the gamma detector and the mini Geiger had hit the top of the scale, whereas the two detectors of electromagnetic interference were not showing anything.”

I remember that and just to clarify he was at the lowest setting so "top of the scale" was still low and safe according to him, but the point was it wasn't background associated which he was sure of.

At that time many people didn't question Celani all they thought was "what kind of gamma generating scam did Rossi create". (Including me I must admit)

But as myself, Observer, Axil and several other educated commenters have pointed out, your first impression of Rossi is not your last.

I should also note something that's very important. The testers are probably all familiar with Rossi and have read about the half dozen demos that Rossi has performed prior to this one (Levi for sure). There is no doubt they have had time to identify, and look for (advised by the various blogs and commenters over two years) many many possible ways Rossi could scam them, and still they found nothing.

The test itself was an evolution from the much maligned flow calorimetry that was so bulky and involved nobody could eliminate all the places he could "hide" stuff. As much as people think the IR calorimetry is unconventional, it works! And they even show it in the paper as well as having calibrated against boiling water. It's also extremely simple, hard to hide stuff because there is no liquid, no pipes, no heat exchanger, etc. In many ways it's a superiour black box test.

but anyways my only point I guess is that you can't fully appreciate this report without understanding the history.

@ self incriminating 275

SI... LOL, You are basically proving my point

@Eric 273

You see your comments are a product of not knowing the history and to be honest not understanding how business is done.

The reason "TRADE SECRETS" exist is because there is no way a patent protects you in many many circumstances the way simply not disclosing or "licensing" does.

Secondly, two people will patent the same invention two different ways and just by saying that it means there is loopholes you can exploit to get around the patent.

Third and final. The patent is not nearly as valuable as the theory behind it.

As far as 20 years??? Rossi has had this thing for like 3 years. And he's a private company, not a scientific institution.

Listen when you guys have lived in the real world a few more years we'll talk. Go start your own company and see how much you'll be willing to disclose "on an NDA."

@self incriminating 275

"If you put in the necessary devices to actually test the device properly, then skeptics will find LESS fault because there will be less fault to find. "

Keep telling yourself that and maybe it'll come true.

By an objective person's account the testers did everything they needed to prove non-chemical energy densities. Anything else is purely perception of fraud.

Fact of the matter is repeated testing needs to be done before people are convinced regardless of how bullet proof a black box test procedure is. Plain and Simple.

And hopefully Rossi and his colleagues will find a way to protect most of their IP while releasing the scientific information people need to replicate the device so they can come up with the underlying physics.

@Observer

We seem to have a lot in common when it comes to technical background. I agree with your assessment of Rossi.

@Axil

I like your enthusiasm and I think you are on to something, I only worry that you are convinced of your theories a little prematurely. Anyways at least your thinking along the same lines I would.

"Keep telling yourself that and maybe it’ll come true."

It'll never come true because such a test will never be allowed.

"By an objective person’s account the testers did everything they needed to prove non-chemical energy densities. Anything else is purely perception of fraud."

Except properly measure input energy. I guess DC and non-60-Hz AC don't exist in your "objective" universe.

Well in actual objective reality they do exist, and the testers did not account for it, ergo they did not do everything to prove the device works. Their procedure had massive holes in it that any objective person can see.

Even most other delusional believers understand this basic fact, which is why there's been the scramble to either invent ways in which such huge holes could not be exploited, or come up with post-hoc inventions like "they stripped the wires" or Essen claiming that he asked around and somebody totally checked for DC current... at some unspecified point in time via some unspecified method that didn't even get a passing mention in the paper despite being of fundamental importance to the basic validity of the test.

You're really going above and beyond the delusional sycophant call of duty to somehow imagine that these holes don't exist.

"Fact of the matter is repeated testing needs to be done before people are convinced regardless of how bullet proof a black box test procedure is."

No amount of shoddy non-testing will ever convince anyone, nor should it. But of course it will convince the gullible regardless of how shoddy or un-reproduced.

You just keep telling yourself that no amount of actual properly-done testing will convince skeptics, and use that as your sad and pathetic excuse for why proper testing was not done. I guess it works for you.

The rest of us require actual evidence.

@SI
"Except properly measure input energy. I guess DC and non-60-Hz AC don’t exist in your “objective” universe."

Again mis-informed old news, has been addressed by the testers.

@SI
"You just keep telling yourself that no amount of actual properly-done testing will convince skeptics, and use that as your sad and pathetic excuse for why proper testing was not done. I guess it works for you.

The rest of us require actual evidence."

Okay SI and with that I think we'll agree to disagree.

Claiming that you asked around and someone totally checked for all that via some unspecified method at an unspecified time that was not documented in the test procedure is only addressing the need of credulous idiots to have a way to go "Nuh-uh! They checked for that!" when rational people point out the obvious hole.

Unfortunately they did not address your need to address the obvious follow-on question:

How?

"Okay SI and with that I think we’ll agree to disagree."

I readily agree to disagree with you that proper testing isn't needed before people calling themselves rational, objective, or skeptical should be convinced.

Well the beauty of the internet is that people can read what we wrote and make up their own minds.

Might as well summarize where the conversation ended, then:

You claimed they addressed the obvious holes in their documented test procedure which did not account for electrical inputs other than 60 Hz AC.

I asked: How did they do this?

here is how both sides are doing in the test evaluation battle with the expert audience. From the forbs comment section:

DONALD ANDERSON

I’m a Professor Ameritus in Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. was in developing long-lived vacuum tubes with nickel fired in hydrogen and vacuum, at temperatures around 1000C. Since have been heavily involved in alternative energy (solar thermal and wind. Everything I read in the 29 page report, and following challenges as answered by the authors, seems extremely convincing. All objections, typically suggesting fraud, are not to me at all convincing. Tomorrow will tell!

Well I'm Raijin, God of Thunder, so my credentials trump a PhD. But I won't ask anyone to trust my expert advice.

I'll just ask the same question: What in the 29-page report that mentioned nothing about checking for DC (or a wide spectrum of AC) inputs during the test convinced him that there could not have been DC (or a wide spectrum of AC) inputs during the test?

"The reason “TRADE SECRETS” exist is because there is no way a patent protects you in many many circumstances the way simply not disclosing or “licensing” does. "

The reason PATENTS exist is because they protect the inventor whilst ensuring that real inventions live on beyond the inventor rather than have to be re-invented again.

Trade secrets DO NOT PROTECT AT ALL.

If you have a trade secret (secret cookie recipe, for example), and someone comes along and nicks your recipe book and tells everyone what it is, then you can get them done for theft, but your idea is now ABSOLUTELY impossible to protect.

If someone guesses or reverse engineers it, your idea is COMPLETELY LOST and, moreover, can be TAKEN AWAY from you if they patent it rather than keep it secret.

The problem for quacks and scammers is that patents require to disclose the scam for what it is, and that is pretty ruinous to their scam.

"I’m a Professor Ameritus in Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. "

Yeah, and there's this dude with a PhD:

Like most people, Dr. Mortenson grew up in an education system that taught evolution as fact. During his first year at the University of Minnesota (where he majored in math) and shortly after becoming a Christian, he began to see the fallacy of the idea of millions of years of evolution. With a Ph.D. in the history of geology from the University of Coventry in England and an M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago

Or Andrew A. Snelling, B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D. Director of Research, AiG-US:

Andrew A. Snelling is a geologist, research scientist and technical editor. He completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Geology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, graduating with First Class Honors in 1975. His Doctor of Philosophy (in geology) was awarded by The University of Sydney, Australia in 1982 for his research thesis entitled “A geochemical study of the Koongarra uranium deposit, Northern Territory, Australia

Well done demonstrating what a PROPER "Appeal to Authority" fallacy is...

The Trojan Horse Method: an Indirect Technique in Nuclear Astrophysics.

This method is used in Astrophysics because the nuclear reactions that occur in space cannot be duplicated here on earth. The coulomb barrier is just to low in space. A nuclear reaction can occur through the action of very low energies; as low a 10 eV as apposed to MeV levels here on earth.

What if someone figured out how to initiate nuclear reaction on earth as easily as they occur in space. Is that impossible?

No, that is what Rossi has done. This breakthrough should make Astrophysics easier to deal with in the future.

Why are isotope levels natural? Because they where produced by LENR in space, within those molecular clouds.

Observer:

@Eric 261 Yes it is. But blackbox testing is scientifically acceptable too, isn’t it?

I suppose in some cases it is. In the case of a power source that the inventor insists be tested only for a short time while plugged into a wall, its not acceptable.

Axil:

The coulomb barrier is just to low in space.

I am amused. LCD, Observer, this is your side making statements like this. And you claim we are the ones who don't have a good grasp of what's going on?

At astrophysical energies the presence of electron clouds must be taken into account in laboratory experiments here on earth.

For nuclear reaction induced in laboratory the target and
projectile nuclei are in the form of atoms.

The atomic electron cloud surrounding the nucleus acts as a screening potential.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/nucl-th/0009071v2.pdf

The screening enhancement effect in laboratory nuclear reactions at astrophysical energies has attracted a lot of attention recently, especially after the recent accomplishments of the LUNA collaboration at Gran Sasso [1]. The very low energies attained for the break-up reaction 3He (3He, 2p)4 He, which is extremely important to the solar neutrino production [2], revealed the real magnitude of the problem, as the screening energy obtained in that experiment still exceeds all available theoretical predictions. Other low energy experiments of the proton-proton chain [3,9](past, current or planned) still need a theoretical model that could account for the observed enhancement.

Astrophysics cannot handle LENR because they don’t think it is possible. This is where Ethan is doing harm to himself by a lack of an open mind on LENR.

we are discussing who is right and it would be very easy to repeat the experiment, only needs a reactor, a little hydrogen and nickel ... and we could try different catalysts .... surely save more energy than writing these comments ...
by the way, what really works is the experiment that is the basis of science, no theoretical explanation, unless that person to believe that current physics explains everything, it is debatable

"For nuclear reaction induced in laboratory the target and
projectile nuclei are in the form of atoms."

You can't be serious. You think nobody has ever experimented with alpha particles? Or that Tokamak don't use plasma and instead are somehow containing neutral hydrogen atoms with electromagnets.

If quasi-neutral plasmas somehow don't count then explain how this is happening in all the 1) clouds of neutral gas and 2) the quasi-neutral clouds of ionized gas in space. Oh right it can't in either of those two cases or we'd have seen it right here on earth.

So where exactly do you think LENR would have any relevance in astrophysics? Are you imagining a cloud of naked nuclei with no electrons around? And some magic that keeps it from dispersing before it ever formed?

This is getting as cute as the Plasma Cosmologists who think electricity controls everything but don't understand electricity.

Armando

I have provided this thread with the build instructions for an gainful open source LENR reactor with COP = 4. Use it to please start your research.

Self-incriminating your post was Self-incriminating.

In the 3He (3He, 2p)4 He reaction, did you ever consider how those two protons can form a cooper pair. This is a violation of the coulomb barrier. This reaction fusion can occur at a max of 20KeV and much lower in space. That’s low right?

Maybe Ethan can explain this reaction to us.

Big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) theory, together with the precise WMAP cosmic baryon density, makes tight predictions for the abundances of the lightest elements.

Deuterium and 4He measurements agree well with expectations, but 7Li observations lie a factor 3 − 4 below the BBN+WMAP prediction. This 4 − 5 mismatch constitutes the cosmic “lithium problem,” with disparate solutions possible. (1) Astrophysical systematics in the observations could exist but are increasingly constrained. (2) Nuclear physics experiments provide a wealth of well-measured cross-section data, but 7Be destruction could be enhanced by unknown or poorly-measured resonances.

Physics beyond the Standard Model can alter the 7Li abundance, though D and 4He must remain unperturbed; Physics is inventing outlandish theories for this puzzle including decaying Super symmetric particles and time-varying fundamental constants. Present and planned experiments could reveal which (if any) of these is the solution to the problem.

Why don’t they consider LENR??? Because they have a closed mind!

http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt780307/PDF/2007MmSAI..78..476G.pdf

The screening of lithium reactions are as high as 17.4 MeV.

LENR is why there is a “Lithium Problem”

Whoa, there! Before you rush ahead solving all the problems of cosmology, let's back up a bit and go over once again why this reaction occurs so commonly in low gravity/energy scenarios in space, but is so mysterious here on earth.

Before you said it was because we only study atoms, not free nuclei, in laboratories here on earth.

Which is audaciously wrong and fantastically stupid, easily "venture capitalists never fall for BS pitches" as dumbest, most trivially false statement of the thread.

So would you like to try again? You obviously don't mind changing your story, and I won't hold it against you either.

* easily beating "“venture capitalists never fall for BS pitches” as dumbest, most trivially false statement of the thread.

@Wow 291

WOW to put it delicately, your a naive fool I'm not wasting my time with you.

@WOW 291

LCD is right.

When a trade secret position is taken by people such as CocaCola and Apple, and every single Defense Contractor in the US they expressly limit the reverse engineering that can happen.

Additionally, you quack job, if something containing a trade secret is sold and subsequently figured out, then nobody can ever patent it again because it falls under prior art.

Cats are a great source of energy. You see people running after their cats all the time.. although I don't think they ever catch them.... but it seems great fun and I have no reason to think that an E-Cat would not be just as great to have.. except easier because you could email it.

I think everyone should have an E-Cat and look forward to the day America creates the E-Dog and proves it is the greatest country on Earth.

Kevin, that's awesome. I'm naming my next cat "E-Cat." It's a great fit: early on, they seem to promise limitless energy. But then they just sit on your couch for the next 10 years.

Andrea Rossi is an old man. He has not claimed any breakthrough in life extension technology. He won't be alive long enough to spend the extra billion dollars that all his convoluted secrecy methods might create for him by purportedly better protecting his "trade secrets" -- after age 60 perhaps people should not be allowed to use the phrase "trade secret" because the only possible economic benefit of secrecy in science or engineering late in one's life is going to accrue only to whatever corporate institution ends up in control of your body of work when you are recycled. Rossi cannot possibly think that he is going to make enough extra money to make the remaining ten years of his life more enjoyable thanks to his secret business methods than those years would be otherwise if he only makes a few million dollars, and the gratitude of humanity, from his efforts. His pathological secrecy makes his work seem crazy, not brilliant. Even if he stumbles upon something real, it will be remembered as the accidental discovery of a crazy old man. With his assertion of "trade secret" he is saying that he cares about what other people think and how they relate to him in the future, and what he is saying that he wants people to feel that they owe him money if they use his invention or the energy it produces. What are the chances that anyone would ever buy this technology, or energy, sold by a crazy old man? Somebody not crazy will have to sell it to consumers, instead, and when that happens there won't be a secret anymore the device will be reverse engineered. If people won't buy the product during the term of patent protection because they refuse to reward crazy, then Rossi will be gone before his invention becomes a commercial success. The whole basis of the secrecy fails the common sense test here. There is a time and place for self-promotion and economic self-interest, but that consideration fades with age as people become more dependent on political acceptance by others for their basic survival. Young people should be very cautious about protecting their self-interest, when they are building a life and a future for themselves, but Rossi should be far more concerned with being taken seriously if he is doing serious work. The secrecy here gives the appearance that Rossi's only concern is to make himself seem important until he finishes his journey in this lifetime and can finally stop his compulsive scheming.

When a trade secret position is taken by people such as CocaCola and Apple, and every single Defense Contractor in the US they expressly limit the reverse engineering that can happen.

Uh, where did I say that didn't happen????

And where in your "enlightenment" of me to this case (a sodding blinding flash of the obvious if ever there was one), where did you mention that if there was a leak, accidental or deliberate by, for example, espionage, was no protection WHATSOEVER for the trade secret and it now was COMPLETELY OPEN?

If someone signed an NDA and broke it and let your "trade secret" out, you'd have them for the clauses in the NDA and contract breech AND THAT IS ALL. You couldn't stop anyone else using that now free information to produce their own "E-Cat" since it never had protection beyond your keeping it a secret.

Where did you mention that?

You know, the bit that I was talking about?

LCD, you're a credulous moron with no more ability to reason in an adult world than a road-stunned baby squirrel.

An ode to Wow

There is a class of non-paid sycophant fan boys that make it their business to curry favor with the gatekeepers of science. They divine in their flights of fantasy what the hierarchy wants and proceed to do their best to impress these powers that be. They want to be like them; like a kid who wants to be a baseball hero: “Babe" Ruth so they mimic all the moves and the attitudes that might reflect on their dreams of glory and approval through doleful imitation. They lack any original ideas and wallow in a quagmire of recrimination hoping to climb the ladder of crony acknowledgment. This pathetic ecosystem of the sad state plaguing scientific politics is what LENR must face

Asking for proof that something works, with an open and verifiable test procedure, is not dogmatically standing in the way of new science. It is only troubling to scammers like Rossi and the sycophants who cling to him.

axil, you're a pathetic excuse for a pretend scientist. You pretend that trade secrets protect anything, have no idea what patents or NDAs mean or do and are desperate, rabidly so, to get people to go along with the scam.

I know the answer!

I'm not sure why everyone keeps getting into astrophysics, when the answer is pretty clear. It just took some serious searching, some cross-referencing of sources, and reviewing prior footage that's not yet in the public domain. Given all that, it's pretty clear from the evidence that there's only one possible answer: it's from super troopers.

Everyone can get back to work now.

1. The recent tests in December and March on the hot-cat were not done for science, but so that a potential sponsor/investor could verify for themselves that the hot-cat works. So to expect it to meet scince paper criteria is pointless as that is not what the test report was for. BTW, the sponsor of the test was pleased with the results and they are going to sponsor another 3 test this summer of 2013.
2. Muon-catalyzed fusion is a fusion reaction that can occur at room temperatures. If the Widom-Larson theory is correct, something similar is happening with LENR. So there is nothing about LENR that violates any laws of physics since we have known that room temperatur fusion is possible for the last 50+ years.
3. Obviously this is very disruptive technology and the Big Players are positioning themselves and part of that requires them to talk down the price of LENR so they can buy into it in a dominating scale. So it is not surprising at all that the main stream press is doing amedia blackout on LENR and that Soros and co have hired scads of astroturfers to do all the dirty work required.

"So to expect it to meet scince paper criteria is pointless as that is not what the test report was for."

Except that is what axil et al are attempting to USE it for.

"If the Widom-Larson theory is correct, something similar is happening with LENR."

Two problems. You forgot that there's an "IF" in there. And the conclusion is not supported by the former, logical disconnect failure.

"Obviously this is very disruptive technology and the Big Players are positioning themselves and part of that requires them to talk down the price of LENR "

Just as obviously, there's huge money to be scammed from this, and the scammers are running around bigging up this fakery to talk up the price of the stock and sell out on the uptick.

So your screeed is not surprising at all. Astroturfing for profit is a well understood and observed phenomena.

1) Well, RGCheek, the only "science paper criteria" we're really interested in is a proper demonstration that the device works and isn't actually being powered by the wall socket it is plugged into. Which it is true this test does not meet. I guess the investors aren't interested in that criteria. Which makes them morons falling for a scam.

Or they have some other way they think they'll make money off it. But they're probably just suckers.

2) Something LIKE the known phenomenon of muon-catalyzed fusion is occurring? "Like" known physics isn't the same as known physics. Or is it REALLY muon-catalyzed fusion, in which case the minor laws-of-physics problem is where are all these muons are coming from?

3) Well it sure was nice of Rossi and Levi to do Soros' job for him by making their "demonstration" so obviously and trivially flawed that all it takes to discredit the device is to point this out.

The best part of this "Big Energy" conspiracy is not the implausibility. Sure entrenched players dislike disruptive technology they don't control. No, the best part is how trivial it would be to end and bring "Big Energy" down overnight. It's simple: patent his invention. Disclose how it works. What the magic pixie dust is.

The device is pretty simple -- a nickle cylinder that doesn't need to be remotely pure, and a power supply generating one or more sinusoidal waveforms -- and could be made in thousands or more different shops around the country. Even if the pixie dust is something exotic, there have to be multiple avenues to get it.

So all he has to do is let people know how to build their own, charge them a nominal sum for the license, and there's nothing Big Energy can do -- they'll all be obsolete, the world will change, and Rossi's name will be synonymous with the new era.

Instead his name will be synonymous with that guy who claimed for decades to have a cold fusion power source but for *some mysterious reason* never had a scientifically valid test to conclusively show this. He'll just be brought up as another "oppressed genius" example to help prop up the next scam.

lol, it is amazing to read a bunch of critics who are not involved in the testing slam on it as obviously flawed when the writers of the paper addressed the issues raised. They tested how much power was coming through the cord and no there was no DC line, they tested for that as well.

And I mention muon cataclyzed fusion simply as an example of room temperature fusion that has been long known, so to say LENR claims are extraordinary is simply a lie.

But the test was not for the benefit of the public, whether you can graspo my point about the purpose of it or not, the fact is the buinsess group that has paid for these tests have found enough evidence to motivate them to pay for a three month test coming later.

Yes, disruptive technologies are almost always opposed by teh scientific establishment as was continental driftl, heavier than air powered and human controled flight, general relativity and evolution. But once the hot-cats are being sold, put in place and generating lots of power around the world, pathoskeptics will not get a pass on all the hubris driven hate-filled rhetoric they have spewed on the public for the last twenty years if anyone seriously discussed LENR.

Those who are ruining careers, running people out of faculties, defunding legit efforts, all these people will be reminded that karma is not just a notion.

There wasn't any testing, idiot-boy.

"karma is not just a notion"

Actually, it is simply a silly notion. But the fact that you think Rossi actually demonstrated something helps explain this part of your post.

RGCheek

And I mention muon cataclyzed fusion simply as an example of room temperature fusion that has been long known, so to say LENR claims are extraordinary is simply a lie.

Its extroadinary because there example you cite is not relvant to the claim. They aren't claiming to use muon-catalyzed fusion, and they ARE claiming to produce fusion without gammas via heretofore unknown excitation mechanisms - something muon-catalyzed fusion doesn't do.

Your logic is like saying "Bob's claim to be able to teleport isn't that extroadinary because, y'know, quantum tunneling."

Yes, disruptive technologies are almost always opposed by teh scientific establishment as was continental driftl, heavier than air powered and human controled flight, general relativity and evolution.

That is an amusing list, given that (i) three of your five aren't actually technologies, (ii) all of those ideas were adopted quickly after there was evidence for them, and (ii) none of the proposers of any of those things made their point using closed-room 'for purchaser only' demonstrations.

Your logic is like saying “Bob’s claim to be able to teleport isn’t that extroadinary because, y’know, quantum tunneling.”

Or like saying "Chewbacca is a Wookie, living on Endor..."

"the writers of the paper addressed the issues raised. They tested how much power was coming through the cord and no there was no DC line, they tested for that as well."

When and how did they test for that? The test procedure in the paper only describes a device that is physically incapable of measuring DC current. If this supposed DC check occurred outside the test itself then it is meaningless.

Every time one of you credulous folk bring up Essen's claim that they did in fact check even though it wasn't in the paper and he didn't know they had done it, I ask this simple question: When, and how?

And every time I'm ignored, and the credulous folk instead decide to start talking about what a meanie-head Wow is. That's because you don't know the answer, you know you don't know, and you can't handle the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously thinking the issues have been addressed.

@RGCheek#319
Muon cataclyzed fusion is an interesting comparison, because that was predicted way before it was achieved using the known laws of Physics.
The experiments were also well done and definitive.

Compare that to the cold fusion people where the claims happily break the known laws of Physics and the 'experiments' are excellent demonstrations of poor calorimetry.

"But the test was not for the benefit of the public"

No indeed; it seems to have been for the benefit of the investors and the credulous. To keep that cash coming in.

"But once the hot-cats are being sold"

Now this if funny, I was hearing this years ago about the e-cats. Supposedly there was a factory (or was it 2?) busily manufacturing them and gearing up to produce millions of units per year.
With many actual sales!

That vanished into non-existence quickly as well.

It's two years later, show me one commercial 1 MW e-cat in use. Anywhere.

Quantum Mechanics allows for things to happen that are contrary to every viewpoint of reality and common sense.

What happens inside an NI/H reactor is not of this universe. It is understandable that people living in this universe to rejects the LENR universe.

Even outstanding true believer scientists cannot accept the violations of physical laws and common sense that have guided them over the decades; explicitly mentioned violation of conservation of momentum/energy since modern physics considers that impossible in no uncertain terms.

Lenr is a catastrophic change in world view that is similar but far more extreme to what the theory of General relativity has brought to the scientific mindset.

Since the 19th century, philosophers have argued about what reasons should persuade scientists to accept a theory.

The rule that most agree with is often summarized by saying: a theory should make testable predictions.

‘‘Falsifiability’’ rather than ‘‘truth’’ thus provides a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

The falsifiability criterion proved to be unsatisfactory because it stigmatized as pseudoscience several theories that are generally regarded as scientific, while labeling as science some theories generally regarded as unscientific.

Physicists judged the new theory not just on its own merits but also on the basis of their own like or dislike of radical change in general.

Why would a particular physicist tend to accept or reject an idea because it is revolutionary? We might find an answer to this question in Frank Sulloway’s study of openness to scientific innovation. Based on analysis of 308 scientists whose positions on relativity before 1930 are known, Sulloway concluded that age is a strong predictor of tendency to accept Einstein’s theories, while social attitudes and birth order are moderately good predictors: young, more liberal scientists who were the second or later child in their family were statistically more likely to support
Relativity.

LENR is at extreme disadvantage over other scientific theories in that the experiments that show the character of LENR are not even accepted. Such experiments are just not considered real or so unbelievable that they must be the stuff of magic.

There are many, but the experiment that most exemplifies this is the one by A.V. Simakin, G.A. Shafeev

See references:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ca…

also see

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=331

How can a scientist look at these experiments and not understand that something is going on that they do not understand.

"Quantum Mechanics allows for things to happen that are contrary to every viewpoint of reality and common sense."

It doesn't make unicorns appear out of thin air.

So saying this is complete bullshit here: it proves nothing other than you're bullshitting the same way those healing crystal cranks are when they talk about the "quantum mechanical memory of the negative emotional waves".

They can't explain how quantum mechanics is doing it either, but they're scamming people who don't know and think that since it talks like this, it must be "science-ey".

"What happens inside an NI/H reactor is not of this universe."

Fantasy in other words.

If you want cold fusion to be taken seriously you need better than this.

Oh, look, ignored once again. So surprised.

Sorry buddy but you're already claiming THIS experiment on its own shows something real, so your ability judge what makes a solid experimental result is in question. Or rather is a joke. So asking "How could a scientists look at these and not agree with me?" is a pretty trivially answered question that does nothing for your case for Rossi.

I don't mean that you suck at science therefore no LENR experiment shows anything. That would be a fallacy. I do mean your assessment of whether that is true is meaningless to me, as demonstrated by the very experiment you are marshalling all these other experiments to defend.

So why don't you just stick to the matter at hand. This test: Does it show his device is a real viable power source, or does it only show that once again Rossi has managed to avoid anything that would reveal a scam? Hint: The answer is the same whether you believe his claims, or any other LENR claims, are true.

Besides all the scientific "irregularities" of Rossis expertiments and demonstrations, there is another, very strong indication of SCAM. At least 90% of websites with "scientific" content is controled by Rossi, domains like journal-of-nuclear-physics.com are just completely ridiculus and have nothing common with scientific community. Just make your own whois and reverse lookup scan and you will see. You can take some article in Forbes seriously. From this point of you is whole project typical 100 % SCAM.

Sorry, but autocorrection in Win 8 is terrible, maybe worst than my english :)

1. You can't take some article in Forbes.
2. From this point of view

It's been long known that scientists are among the easiest to fool when it comes to fraudulent demonstrations of, e.g., psi "abilities." For a historical example read about the Creery girls and Jane Dean here. The reason James (The Amazing) Randi hasn't yet had to fork over the $1m prize is because as an illusionist himself, he's aware of the various ways purported psychics can deceive folks (and sometimes themselves).

RBH, bullshit.

Or are you trying to demonstrate psi powers here by your mindreading abilities?

Sorry if this has been pointed out before, but:

The "wire trick" not only shows how hidden power could be provided to the E-Cat, but it provides a way to predict HOW MUCH power could be supplied.

The report claimed that 2 of the 3 phases were drawing current of 400 Watts each, for 33% of the time, giving an average power level of:

2 phases * 400 Watts * 33% duty cycle = 267 Watts

However, if the supposedly dead 3rd phase was delivering the same power as the other 2 phases, and doing so with a100% duty cycle (to maximize the apparent power output), the average power in level would by:

2 phases * 400 Watts * 33% + 1 phase * 400 * 100% = 667 Watts.

Which gives us an apparent COP of:
667 / 267 = 2.5

Exactly what the testers found!

It's possible that Rossi could have pushed MORE than equal power through that 3rd phase, but given the simplest possible fraud, we get exactly the results the testers found.

Hahahahahah,

The f+cking lame Desinformts are back and people still falling for it!

The Opposite is true, it works, really research the terms and don't believe some payed pseudoscientist on pseudoscienceblogs, because they give you nothing, but shít in face with untrue "facts" and megascepticism and no real interest in new science at all. que bono bítches!?

"Ruthless peer review"

Haha, good one.

It may work, it may not. Either way, people are getting awfully confused on one point -- this is industry, not science. I have clients using 50-year-old technologies that no one else can explain or duplicate despite billions in R&D and decades of failed attempts. That doesn't mean they don't work.

Rossi and Defkalion have done some fairly good demonstrations. It may be fraud, but the lack of absolute scientific proof or perfect tests doesn't mean much.

BTW Randi's people have been invited to the Defkalion demos. Hopefully they can either confirm or rule out a "wire trick."

"Also there are so many theories. For example Hagelstein believes in the splitting of quanta but doesn’t know how. Kim thinks it’s a form of BEC and coulomb screening along with quanta splitting. DGT thinks Rydberg Hydrogen interacts with something like rutile Ni(II)Fl. Rossi’s latest explanation is somekind of hydrogen squeezing effect as far as I can tell. Brioullin thinks the Ni matrix is just a catalyst and the hydrogen fuses up all the way to He4 (that’s straight cold fusion). Miley thinks it’s some type of vacancy stuffed with H or D that induces some form of fusion nobody has yet seen probably though an intermediary exotic quasi-particle. Ed Storms thinks its special cracks/deformities in the Ni/Pd along with some coherent oscillations. Widom and Larsen believe SPPs create heavy electrons that form Neutrons that eventually are captured by the Nickel and transmute. There are probably more. Axil seems to have a theory that is a combination of WL/Kim/Hagelstein/Storms."

Good summary, thanks. In this the Age of Theory, people often forget that science usually advances by experiment.

"I’m taking it for granted that the vast majority of you don’t have the required expertise to tell whether this is legitimate"

Well, if we had access to the device, and the sort of equipment available in a Secondary School Physics Department, we could prove beyond reasonable doubt if this works thermodynamically. (we couldn't perhaps rule out a lump of plutonium).

Let me get this straight. Andrea Rossi is guy has run two companies that were frauds. He convicted felon, and recognized as a known con man. At the very least, his past seems to imply the man is less than honest, and shouldn't be trusted than you could throw an elephant.
Even though he really has no background in physics, he claims to have a create a cold reactor that can produce energy,
The contents of this reactor are secret, but the reaction can't be explained by known physics. He refuses to allow any independent testing, and based what we know about fusion reactions- everybody in a vicinity of the test should have been exposed gamma radiation- and likely end up with radiation sickness. Especially the shielding was minimal.
If it smells like a duck, and looks like a duck- ITS A DUCK!

Now I know that people want cold fusion to exist, but are you really going to let your hopes rest on this guy? You got to be kidding. I've spend the last few hours reading up Andrea Rossi, and listened to arguments from both his supporters and critics. Based on preponderance of the evidence, he is fraud, the E-cat is a hoax, and as juror I would have no problem voting guilty.
And that is with the burden of proof being on the side of the critics. In science it is opposite. It is up to the inventor to proof the worthiness of his product beyond a reasonable doubt, and Rossi doesn't even come anywhere near this criteria.

The only nuclear transmutations involving Nickel - 64 that I know of, "...Roentgenium was first synthesized by an international team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, on December 8, 1994.[6] The team bombarded a target of bismuth-209 with accelerated nuclei of nickel-64 and detected a single atom of the isotope roentgenium-272:..." (Wikipedia.) Roentgenium is in the same periodic family as Copper Silver and Gold.

"Tempus Omnia Revelat" time reveals all, Rossi is pressing on with his claims, and sophisticated investors with money to burn are lined up by the dozen. Accountants often need to lose a few million dollars, to keep the tax-man at bay.

SMELLS LIKE A HOAX, BUT...

Hi all, I'm a scientist in an unrelated field to physics, and I've been casually reading about Rossi's E-Cat for the past hour or so. I must say that I'm very skeptical and I agree with those that say that this shows all the signs of a hoax. There is one thing though that bothers me, and maybe some of you can answer my question or give me pointers to forums where my question has been discussed:

If Rossi is hoaxer, then surely his competitors (I've heard about Defkalion and Brillouin) are hoaxers too, right? In particular Defkalion is a direct spin-off of Rossi's ideas... so as a logical consequence of the hoax theory, someone in Defkalion must know about the trick behind the e-cat and must be repeating it in its own demonstrations. And what about Brillouin? http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/09/whats-the-google-brillouin-connection/

If it is a hoax, how come that the trick is spreading from company to company without being exposed by the (many!) who are interested in this?

Uh, "It's a hoax" IS being spread. That's what this thread is about, for crying out loud!

What's also known is that people who don't trust scientists will trust a scientist that says "the establishment scientists don't want you to know about this" because it fits in with their conspiracy views.

And such people will continue to believe that the idea is right even after failing because "the establishment" made it fail.

Consider SPAM. WHO THE HELL CLICKS ON IT?

Nobody.

But what spammers do is sell the idea of people clicking on it to marketers who have no idea what the hell they're doing and need a gimmick to get this quarterly bonus.

None of them give a fig whether it works, all they need is enough appearance of action to fool someone who can't or won't look too closely.

http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/10/lenr-101-by-gordon-docherty/

So, what do we all think of the Iwamura replications published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics?

Something's obviously wrong with that experiment, and McKubre's, and Haggelstein's, and P&F, and SPAWAR's, and Celani's... I'm probably missing even more.

The very fact that these results are so inconsistent seems to me to point to there being something happening that we don't quite understand. All of these experiments have been testing for different things, using different calorimetry and come to positive results, while they have all also been marked by inconsistency -- getting much better in that McKubre and Rossi at least claim to be able to control the reaction -- with the same setups!

So what is it that all of these people are measuring incorrectly? P&F were replicated by some, and some of the negative results even had implications of foul-play(MIT at least, where Haggelstein was shutout for daring to continue experimenting [just have to take care of that by taking away his lab]).

And doesn't Muon cold-fusion show that it IS possible to work around the coulomb barrier? There seem to be many similarities between superconductors and 'cold fusion'.

The empirical results are there. And yet they say there isn't enough proof and then shut them out of research... because there isn't enough proof. Hey let's ignore superconductors too, we don't understand, therefore they're not real.

Check out Julian Schwinger if you want to see what a serious and very well respected -- as in refining quantum field theory mathematically beyond Feynmann -- heavy hitter had to say about it... oh yeah, his papers were shut out of journals too (obviously he's crazy >.>)

He aprendido mucho de ustedes. Gracias por este debate.

I'm not leaning for or against Rossi's proposition or his claims, although I do retain quite a bit of skepticism from experience. My problem with device, test, and subsequent observations boils down to this:
If Rossi is on the cutting edge of a cold-fusion breakthrough, and if his device actually does work, how is it possible the people around Rossi with the cash, his assistants, and Rossi himself would not appear to comprehend the most elementary scientific processes involving efforts to quantify, analyze (using real data), and essentially validate the proposed "Break-Thru" for once and for all time? Certainly Rossi should be overflowing with definitive "Proofs" to silence his detractors forever...like an "In your face, Tomahawk, Slam Dunk"!! Personally, I would have mountains of "Proofs" available for everyone to witness shutting up forever even the tiniest or remotest skeptic. I do know some people---in the Invention Club---are quirky, goofy, and have no time for the "particulars". But there remains NO PERSON around Rossi who recognizes this particular achievement and subsequent "peeling back the layers of evidence" making Rossi and his Assistants probably the Thomas Edison, Tesla, Isaac Newton combined in our present day? No One?? Hard to fathom...Shoot, if my wife sees me changing a light bulb she calls her Mother! Thank You!

Well, it is clearly evident from reading the comments on this page that this device most certainly DOES work.
It is extremely effective at convincing people that you can produce energy by magic, to the extent that they dismiss out of hand the lack of valid evidence presented, ignore all criticism of the validity of what is provided, and uncritically accept unsupported post-hoc rebuttals of the criticism which have even less validity than the original "evidence", thereby allowing Rossi to easily obtain money/adulation/fellatio/whatever he is after from those on whom his device has had its intended effect.
Of course it doesn't really produce energy by magic but that is only its claimed purpose; its real purpose is just to *make people believe* that it produces energy by magic.
Still, it is entertaining. Perhaps the most entertaining bit was the letter from Rossi quoted in comment #184 in which a "Prof of Electric Measurement" with a severe case of caps-lock rage denies Khirchoff.

There is no magic. Power goes in, more comes out like a gasoline engine. The fuel is the hydrogen packed into the tin, no need for Santa Clause or hocus pocus.

I have bookmarked this page and fully intend to come back when Heat Industry starts selling these things on the open market to see what fools you psychoskeptics have been.

@RGCheek #358: It would appear that you don't understand how a "gasoline engine" (internal combustion) works.

Energy goes in, in the form of the chemical binding energy of the fuel, and *LESS* energy comes out in the form of kinetic energy, because some (about 30%) of the energy release when the fuel burns goes into unused heat. If you add up the energy dispersed in waste heat (and a tiny bit in sound, vibration, etc.) combined with the kinetic energy, you get back the original chemical energy of the gasoline, plus the small amount of electric energy used to ignite the fuel in the first place.

The magical absurdity of the E-Cat is precisely the claim that more _total_ energy comes out of the device than was put in in the first place.

It's closer to 65% is wasted, Michael.

"Well, it is clearly evident from reading the comments on this page that this device most certainly DOES work."

And so does the magic hat that produces doves and rabbits.

@Wow #360: Yup! I started with the intention of writing the 30% efficiency value, but ended up talking about the 1-efficency waste.

All of the thermodynamic-cycle engines (Carnot, Otto, Diesel, whatever) have relatively low efficiency, because they're limited by the hot and cold reservoirs. If I recall, as a (very!) rough rule of thumb, you can guess the efficiency as delta-T/Tcold, with T absolute (Kelvins). The real calculation requires you to integrate the area of the cycle, of course.

Modify the control circuit to run on 12 Vdc and then use a standard Sears Diehard battery for the tests.
The power and energy density are fixed, no hidden wires from the wall, The battery will eventually die and if the experiment is faked, the experiment dies with it.
Eliminates the alternate power source concerns, also, as the available energy out of the battery is known. There is a fixed value to compare energy out of the reactor to.

That isn't allowed by the "inventor". They set it up and you're not allowed to change the setup or investigate it.

It would find out if there's a real effect.

And by denying such a test, you have yet more evidence of a fraud being committed.

Wow,

Has it been proposed?

No, the inventor said that it cannot be changed or tampered with and must be considered a black box setup (the claim is that otherwise they would find out his secret (that he's patented! Not forgetting that NDAs exist..) so he doesn't want them looking at it closely).

Don't tamper with the "box",
Simply change the input power supply from
Outlet to battery

Anthropogenic Global Warming fits your definition of Pseudoscience perfectly.

@Fredster #368: Don't read much published science, eh?

@359 "the magical absurdity of the Ecat is
precisely the claim that more_total_energy
comes out of the device than was put in in
the first place." Rossi never claimed any
such thing.
Further, if what he is saying is true one day
one will be able to say "Energy goes in, in
form of nuclear binding energy of the fuel,
and *Less* energy comes out in the form kinetIc
enery. . .etc etc etc".
Motl and others seem to never heard of let alone used the lumped matter discipline

Cool More psuedo scientific drivel!
Can we power our world with drivel?
What is the boiling point of drivel?
Can the "Rossi Ecat" use drivel?
To power the world?

yes! Drivel in equals Drivel out!
A machine (the Rossi Ecat) outputs more energy than is put into it WITHOUT generating RADIATION of any kind while
TRANSMUTING Ni into Cu?
Good luck with that!
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat-is-back-an…

Come on get more involved since I have led these "people" (idiots) to you!!!!

Well Rossi sold the rights to the E-Cat for 12 million dollars. Cherokee ILL is now in negotiations with China to build 100 megawatt plants to supply power. So You say it just doesn`t work???

Frank,

That proves nothing except that Rossi managed to convince some people that his device works. When we actually see a 100 MW power plant based on the e-cat, then that's different. I suspect that the proposed power plant will run into "regulatory hurdles" or "technical issues" or some such thing and never actually be built.

While $12 million sounds like a lot of money to us, for a large corporation, it's a small gamble. If it turns out that Rossi has the goods, it's a bonanza for Cherokee. If not, well it's a nice tax write off, but certainly not a disastrous loss.

Yeah!
The point is who cares about Cherokee!
No one has ANY proof this happened!
Where is a WORKING
SOLD
PROVEN
"Rossi Ecat"?
Where?
The Science says NO!
The lack of a WORKING "Rossi Ecat" (sold and used)
SAYS NO!
Everything about the "Rossi Ecat" says NO!
Prove it - OR SHUT UP!

Prove the "Rossi Ecat" works or shut up AlainCo!
Prove it works!
Do some "Proving" or do some "shutting up"!
END!

Move along there is nothing more to see!
The museum is closed!
The unworkable devices are still UNWORKABLE!
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm

Note that there will be a new test writeup on a six-month E-Cat test coming out shortly from a team in Sweden. Whether it will be considered an independent test or not, and whether the methods will be felt to be sound or not, will no doubt depend upon one's religious persuasions^H^H^H^H^H^H^H training and right thinking. But the author may find the upcoming report interesting nonetheless.

Eric, the "new test" paper has now been postponed until September, no doubt to allow the researchers to lose some weight and get makeovers prior the Nobel ceremony.

Based on the thermography, what is the temp of the reactor?
Run an energy balance to determine how much power/energy is needed to get the reactor to that temp.
Assume a 3 phase voltage of X, then determine what amount of current is needed to attain that temp.
Does the existing wire size support this amount of current flow?

axil, please come back!

I miss all your pseudo-scientific trolling (and the rightful debunking)!

I invent a machine that produces more power than put into it, without radiations or toxicity, it runs for days and weeks.

Where is it today?

Oh, it was a scam...

http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LuganoRe…

This is a link to the new third party independent test of Rossi new reactor that shows a COP of 3.5 and above. enjoy the read.

You are right. There is no useful information for positively evaluating the experiment.
It would not be difficult to understand if it works or not. It would be sufficient an honest and clear energy balance of the experiment. But none has ever been provided. It is not necessary any complicate apparatus.

NASA have working LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction ie: Cold Fusion) systems. True they use more energy to spark the reaction than they get out of it, but they haven't given up looking yet. So cold fusion is possible, the question is it possible more out than in?

Also, pretty sure NASA's LENR doesn't produce gamma radiation into the environment. It's a low energy nuclear reaction, gamma rays are absorbed by the reaction and converted into infrared. So lack of gamma ray detection may not be sufficient falsification to disprove the experiment.

That all said, I do find it very dodgy that the independent team aren't able to shutdown the power so they can insert their own testing equipment in line with the power source. That just cries snake oil merchant.

If there is so much controversy over the tests why not have other scientific groups do tests and make measurements? Several tests by different agencies could clear any doubt.

Because they're not allowed to do tests freely, Carl.

Much like the reason why all those people protesting China's authoritarian rule aren't going to China to live there and protest: it won't be allowed.

Not that Slashdot is ... well ... anyhow, what now?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/12/232230/independent-researchers-…

The link you posted just doesn't seem right. They claim that the e-cat produced a net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours over 32 days. 32 days is 768 hours. 1.5 million watt-hours divided by 768 hours gives 1953 watts. I have water heaters in my lab that are capable of running at a power of 1953 watts, yet the link you reference claims that only a fusion reaction could produce the observed energy? If the link gets that bit of basic physics wrong, why should anyone consider it credible?

Some updates:
In the meanwhile, Hyperion has been recognized as a hoax, resellers like Proia flied away from the saga,copper has been declared only an impurity by Rossi himself and Ni62, originally part of the fuel, is now declared as final ash transmutation. Gammas are no more there to make the E Cat work but Rossi claims he lives in a container to prove it is working. We are in the middle of 2015 and there will be around 400 days to wait to learn by Rossi words the E Cat works fine and it will take some more time, might be 400 days more, to see it on the marked...

Well, you must be like Axil (who still believes Hyperion was not a scam) to trust this is serious stuff

2016, still no news.

Easy logic thinking:

Machine A generates 900W of power from 300 W input power
600W per h are your return.
So why dont you just build 10 of these, let them run around the clock and sell the energy to the grid provider --> instant profit--> more research--> more output--> less investors money--> more instant profit--> world domination

right now Rossi and a lot of other folks are still figuring out step 1. sell energy to grid provider....

Axil on May 23, 2013 Post@128 says

“Rossi does not trust professional science. It has treated him poorly. He thinks that DGT has stolen his technology, but their technology is very different I think far better. They get a COP of 20.
DGT can produce the LENR effect absolutely.

(More bullshit snipped ”

No Axil, DGT produced exactly what Rossi produces, nothing but bullshit. DGT tested and failed.

http://energycatalyzer3.com/news/defkalion-device-failed-to-produce-exc…
“The Hyperion low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) device from Defkalion Green Technologies failed to produce excess in critical tests over the summer. “

https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/2902-So-Defkalion-had…

Rossi is an obvious fraudster just as DGT WAS. “The ecat” is Rossi's third well known fraud.