Merged Cold Fusion Claims

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acementhead said:
Some good discussion of the latest iteration, the dog-bone cat, of Rossi's latest scam(following his 'thermo-electric generator' and PetrolDragon scams) the ecat.

The usual half-witted fanboys are there of course, but smart, knowledgeable posters as well.

http://www.science20.com/a_quantum_...on_a_better_study_on_the_infamous_ecat-146700
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Rossi has a metal tube with some resistors in it and when he puts current thru them they get hot and when he throws in his magic pixy dust it, thru a nuclear reaction, generates 3X more heat than can be explained by the input current.

Is that about right?
 
tsig said:
Rossi has a metal tube with some resistors in it and when he puts current thru them they get hot and when he throws in his magic pixy dust it, thru a nuclear reaction, generates 3X more heat than can be explained by the input current.

Is that about right?
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And when it does so, no gamma rays or radioactivity is detected, although the transmutations inferred from the alleged changes in the isotopic constitution of the pixy dust can't even occur in main sequence stars, but only in supernovae. He's got a table top supernova that needs to be plugged into the mains.
 
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Well, that's a win-win situation for us "Rossi is a scammer" skeptics.

a) If it's wrong/fake, we're in the same situation we were before.

b) If it's real, we get all the societal benefits of McMiracle Energy (which at this point is in the public domain, having its formula guessed and published while entirely out of patent protection) while also enjoying the schadenfreude of knowing that Rossi's refusal to patent, publish, collaborate, etc.. etc., has cost him the whole show.

ETA: To put it another way, if this is real, everyone who ever said "Dude, if the effect is as big and as controllable as Rossi says, he should be able to reproduce it without six layers of scammy obfuscation, and his failure to do so is his own fault" will have been right. Everyone who said "The effect claimed is physically impossible" will have been wrong. I've said both, but I'd be happy to be wrong about the latter.
 
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ben m said:
... if this is real, everyone who ever said "Dude, if the effect is as big and as controllable as Rossi says, he should be able to reproduce it without six layers of scammy obfuscation, and his failure to do so is his own fault" will have been right.
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And that's the heart of the mystery. People who have a scam try to make their stuff look authentic. People who have authentic stuff don't make it look like a scam. They neither need to, not have any motive to do this. But Rossi does. Defkalion does.

There's an old saying, "Nobody cries stinking fish." And if they do, they probably really do have stinking fish. So somebody looks in the basket and finds fresh fish? It's all very weird, and I'll wait for further info.
 
marplots said:
Does a chemical reaction explain the apparent energy production?
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Eight minutes of off line energy production, at the end of a very long run connected to an electric power supply. Only manifesting itself at above 1000 degrees, following the moment when the heater suffered a failure.

I want more data. But yes, if it is producing over unity power, I am extremely pleased.
 
Did they do any analysis of the fuel after the experiment to determine what if any chemical changes had occurred? Perhaps the answer to my question is obvious if I understood what is being claimed here a bit better?

Do Raney Nickel reactions play any part in what is going on here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raney_nickel

Is there a chemist that is participating in this thread or that we could ask to have a look at this?

The use of water loss seemed like a really good way of doing the heat gain testing, but I don't understand how they eliminated the possibility of heat gain from a chemical reaction. I guess this just gets back to my question about whether they did a chemical analysis of the fuel at the end of the experiment and what was the results if they did.

Recombination, meaning the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to create water was put forth in some independent* experiments of BlacklightPower claims. Is anything like that possible here?

* BlacklightPower claims of independent replication are mostly BS. The experiments that I am referring to here were done by a NASA researcher.
 
Actually, water loss by boiling is not a good way to measure heat. Heating a large mass of water is. A nice system would heat the water from RT to 50C, minimizing measurement error with a substantial delta T and allowing ready calculation of heat output as the Cp of water is reasonably constant over that range.
 
pteridine said:
Actually, water loss by boiling is not a good way to measure heat. Heating a large mass of water is. A nice system would heat the water from RT to 50C, minimizing measurement error with a substantial delta T and allowing ready calculation of heat output as the Cp of water is reasonably constant over that range.
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Using a relatively small amount of water, letting a quantity of it boil off and then weighing the amount remaining, as seems to have been done here -- is that a good way of measuring the heat generated by the ecat?
 
ben m said:
Well, that's a win-win situation for us "Rossi is a scammer" skeptics.

a) If it's wrong/fake, we're in the same situation we were before.

b) If it's real, we get all the societal benefits of McMiracle Energy (which at this point is in the public domain, having its formula guessed and published while entirely out of patent protection) while also enjoying the schadenfreude of knowing that Rossi's refusal to patent, publish, collaborate, etc.. etc., has cost him the whole show.

ETA: To put it another way, if this is real, everyone who ever said "Dude, if the effect is as big and as controllable as Rossi says, he should be able to reproduce it without six layers of scammy obfuscation, and his failure to do so is his own fault" will have been right. Everyone who said "The effect claimed is physically impossible" will have been wrong. I've said both, but I'd be happy to be wrong about the latter.
Click to expand...

As I noted previously, it seems as though enough observations have been made by enough people to suggest that there may be something here that we do not understand. Many came into this with the philosophy that if they couldn't understand what was happening, then it was obviously a scam. Many tried to invoke theories without knowing what was happening and rejected the phenomenon based on a misapplied concept.

Your vindictiveness and animosity toward Rossi is surprising. I thought that you were a scientist that would revel in a new area of study. The Higgs Boson is so yesterday. Perhaps it is petty jealousy that a man of your education rejected a new phenomenon based on a gut feeling while a garage inventor made something that may turn out to be one of the more useful inventions in history.
I was with ONR in the late 80's when Stan Pons was loading Pd with D and saw some anomalous exotherms. More than one person came forward and claimed that they, too, had seen the effect, but never reported it for [insert reason here]. After the dogmatic hot fusion lynch mobs were done with Stan and Martin, it suddenly seemed that no one had seen the effect. One anonymous egomaniac even invented the concept of the "Lewis Rule" which anointed his selfimportanceship with the power to determine what was a thermal effect and what wasn't. True genius will not be suppressed by lesser mortals. Some arrogant blowhards even wrote books about how it was the scientific debacle of the ages. Buy them up now, as they will be valuable collector's editions. Probably all are even first editions unless an edition was only a few copies.
Now we get to watch those who prematurely condemned Rossi try to weasel and worm their way around to disinterested scientist personae. Perhaps some of them will come up with a working theory and hope for a prize for explaining what was happening even though they were so closed minded as to reject this in the first place. Some will even claim a "Win-win."
 
Reply to Craig: It is one way of measuring heat but the temperature of the steam complicates matters as does entrained water vapor. In this case, while not completely precise, it will suffice as the excess heat in this experiment is significant. In situations where a 10% gain is being measured, we are better served with measurements of delta T of liquid water.
 
Yes it's marvelous as long as you keep it connected to the mains and the heater on.
 
pteridine said:
As I noted previously, it seems as though enough observations have been made by enough people to suggest that there may be something here that we do not understand. Many came into this with the philosophy that if they couldn't understand what was happening, then it was obviously a scam. Many tried to invoke theories without knowing what was happening and rejected the phenomenon based on a misapplied concept.

Your vindictiveness and animosity toward Rossi is surprising. I thought that you were a scientist that would revel in a new area of study. The Higgs Boson is so yesterday. Perhaps it is petty jealousy that a man of your education rejected a new phenomenon based on a gut feeling while a garage inventor made something that may turn out to be one of the more useful inventions in history.
I was with ONR in the late 80's when Stan Pons was loading Pd with D and saw some anomalous exotherms. More than one person came forward and claimed that they, too, had seen the effect, but never reported it for [insert reason here]. After the dogmatic hot fusion lynch mobs were done with Stan and Martin, it suddenly seemed that no one had seen the effect. One anonymous egomaniac even invented the concept of the "Lewis Rule" which anointed his selfimportanceship with the power to determine what was a thermal effect and what wasn't. True genius will not be suppressed by lesser mortals. Some arrogant blowhards even wrote books about how it was the scientific debacle of the ages. Buy them up now, as they will be valuable collector's editions. Probably all are even first editions unless an edition was only a few copies.
Now we get to watch those who prematurely condemned Rossi try to weasel and worm their way around to disinterested scientist personae. Perhaps some of them will come up with a working theory and hope for a prize for explaining what was happening even though they were so closed minded as to reject this in the first place. Some will even claim a "Win-win."
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We will see. The trouble is that Rossi is a liar. He has never heated a factory in Bologna with an ecat. He has been convicted of a waste disposal scam that cost Italy millions to clean up. He is a crook. I don't believe he has sold devices for a million dollars a pop. I don't believe he has, or ever had, factories in the USA, Sweden or Italy or anywhere else churning out masses of ecat units. He looks to the unbiased eye like a scammer. If he has a genuine reaction going, why has he not produced convincing evidence of it? These are the problems.

ETA See here and especially this bit. We'll see if they have to change their minds. How long do we have to wait this time, by the way, before we decide it's another false alarm? But again, if it proves to be true, nobody will be more pleased than I am.
 
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pteridine said:
As I noted previously, it seems as though enough observations have been made by enough people to suggest that there may be something here that we do not understand. Many came into this with the philosophy that if they couldn't understand what was happening, then it was obviously a scam. Many tried to invoke theories without knowing what was happening and rejected the phenomenon based on a misapplied concept.

Your vindictiveness and animosity toward Rossi is surprising. I thought that you were a scientist that would revel in a new area of study. The Higgs Boson is so yesterday. Perhaps it is petty jealousy that a man of your education rejected a new phenomenon based on a gut feeling while a garage inventor made something that may turn out to be one of the more useful inventions in history.
I was with ONR in the late 80's when Stan Pons was loading Pd with D and saw some anomalous exotherms. More than one person came forward and claimed that they, too, had seen the effect, but never reported it for [insert reason here]. After the dogmatic hot fusion lynch mobs were done with Stan and Martin, it suddenly seemed that no one had seen the effect. One anonymous egomaniac even invented the concept of the "Lewis Rule" which anointed his selfimportanceship with the power to determine what was a thermal effect and what wasn't. True genius will not be suppressed by lesser mortals. Some arrogant blowhards even wrote books about how it was the scientific debacle of the ages. Buy them up now, as they will be valuable collector's editions. Probably all are even first editions unless an edition was only a few copies.
Now we get to watch those who prematurely condemned Rossi try to weasel and worm their way around to disinterested scientist personae. Perhaps some of them will come up with a working theory and hope for a prize for explaining what was happening even though they were so closed minded as to reject this in the first place. Some will even claim a "Win-win."
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I do believe youre getting somewhat carried away.

The "do not understand" part is more along the lines of "do not have the information to arrive at a conclusion", mainly because Rossi has done everything possible to avoid the use of controlled, repeatable independent measurement methods.

There's been so much flim-flam in the experimental design and controls so far that whilst an *appearance* of overunity can be achieved, the lack of sustainability leaves the question open (if one were to take a most generous interpretation).

it would be great if Rossi did pull a rabbit out of his hat. His apparent incompetence in experimental design and measurement does, however, suggest otherwise...
 
pteridine said:
(much snipped)
Now we get to watch those who prematurely condemned Rossi try to weasel and worm their way around to disinterested scientist personae. Perhaps some of them will come up with a working theory and hope for a prize for explaining what was happening even though they were so closed minded as to reject this in the first place. Some will even claim a "Win-win."
Click to expand...

There's no dishonor in distrusting someone who won't do proper experiments, challenging that person and assuming, if it smells like a scam, it's probably a scam. Now, subsequently, if that person turns out to be correct, it's no fault of mine they couldn't do a proper demonstration.

The only way it makes skeptics look bad is if the experiments are run and the method validated, we don't change our minds. So yes, "win-win" is a good way of putting it, since all we are really after is the truth.
 
pteridine said:
Your vindictiveness and animosity toward Rossi is surprising. I thought that you were a scientist that would revel in a new area of study. The Higgs Boson is so yesterday. Perhaps it is petty jealousy that a man of your education rejected a new phenomenon based on a gut feeling while a garage inventor made something that may turn out to be one of the more useful inventions in history.
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Pteridine, you're welcome to find my old posts in this and other threads. I've been saying precisely the same thing for years.

1) No one would be happier than I if cold fusion technology is real.
2) Wanting it to be true does not make it true. Show me some convincing evidence.
3) Rossi does not act like he's trying to convince me, and he's not acting like a guy sitting on a real technology. Rossi acts precisely like he's trying to convince the marks in some sort of penny-stock scam.

The evidence favoring "Rossi is a scammer" is much, much stronger than the evidence saying "Rossi has discovered cold fusion". I believe the stronger evidence.
 
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