So I'll put you in the no, *I'm so convinced that even if I were offered a chance to get in on the ground floor and invest that $100 in Rossi's venture, I'd say no* camp. Even the possibility that the $100 might turn in to hundreds of thousands of dollars soon wouldn't sway you.
Anyone else?
I don't play the lottery, even though there's an infinitesimal chance that my dollar can turn into millions. That's an even greater rate of return, but it's still a wasted dollar when you do the math.
This is more like poker, in that it's a game of human perceptions as well as probabilities. We get to make guesses as to if he's bluffing and either keep our money or bet it. My educated guess is that he's bluffing, so the expected return on my money is zero. I won't throw a single dollar away on zero return, unless it's for a good cause. In my book, financing a conman in his latest swindle doesn't count as a good cause.
By the way, my criteria for 'is he bluffing' comes down to 'If I was a bad man and wanted to cheat people, could I replicate this effect through fraud, given the same conditions he has'. In this case the answer is yes. For somewhere less than a thousand dollars or so, I could make a reactor that would do everything that Rossi's has done, especially if I also refused to let anyone look inside. The only difference is that I'm not trying to take your money, and I'd freely admit that I was using nothing but trickery and showmanship.
The greatest moments in science didn't start with the mythical 'eureka' moment; they started with someone looking at data and saying 'hey that's odd'. When a real scientist gets a 'hey, that's odd' moment that they can't figure out they get lots and lots of eyes on the data, and get lots of other people trying to replicate it because a 'hey that's odd' can be something real or it can be an error and they want to know which one, and as soon as possible. Even the lenr saints, pons and fleischman eventually got to that stage, unfortunately AFTER they tried to do science by press release.
When a 'scientist' says they had a 'hey that's odd' moment but that they kept it secret for fear of (insert conspiracy organization) shutting them down, when they try to take it straight from inspiraton to salable product without the research, when they actually don't keep it secret but tell everyone or at least everyone they want money from, when they never ever let anyone see what's in the box or behind the curtain, that's a conman with a magic trick.
If there's one thing ya'all should take away from this site and the man it's named after, its that con men are capable of fooling scientists because scientists are good at science but not good at confidence games.
