Oz skeptic offers prize if Rossi’s E-cat works Australian entrepreneur, philanthropist, skeptic, aviator and eccentric Dick Smith has offered $AU200,000 for proof that the Andrea Rossi “energy catalyzer” actually works. With a local in the town of Mullumbimby hoping to pitch the E-cat to locals as an attractive investment, Smith has offered to send along Australian …
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Somewhere at the back of my mind is the idea that there was one (or more) battery that was in common use before it's exact chemical workings were fully understood (lead-acid ?).
The problem that this, or any other cold fusion device, may seem to break or bend what is currently doctrine about physics should be no bar to it's use. Either it works or it's a sham. If it works, use it, and explain how it works later.
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l%40eskimo.com/msg59278.html:
This applies to most of you too. Read about things properly, stop being so arrogant.
"You say that, and I think you are sincere. But your actions prove you are deceiving yourself. You despise cold fusion. You are working tirelessly to prevent funding and destroy the field. Whenever it is mentioned in the mass media, you go to the comment section and fill it with unfounded, ignorant blather, technical mistakes about papers you have not read, guilt by associations, and baseless accusations of fraud. You and hundreds of others like you poison the well and destroy people's lives and careers with your reckless accusations. You think it is all a game, and words have no consequences. You pretend this does not matter.
Ask yourself: Have you ever once, in the mass media, mentioned that there is quality work out there, or 'I favor funding for cold fusion'? You say it here, to this audience. Have you written at Time magazine, or Fox News? I doubt it.
You remind of elderly white bigots in Georgia who say they got along well with black people and loved them like family. Yet these people were in charge until the 1970s, and they maintained race divided schools in Atlanta, where the black schools had no books, no laboratory equipment, filthy bathrooms with backed up toilets, and such crowded classes that half the kids attended in the morning, and half in the afternoon, and most dropped out. This was a machine intended to destroy lives and keep people in dire poverty. The older people deny that is how things were. They say
they didn't know, they never saw it. They deny it was their fault. But it was their fault."
If you've bothered to read any of the history in this field since 1989, you'll see that Robert Park (notably silent on this very topic) has been responsible for destroying many careers due to his arrogance.
The "they laughed at Columbus" argument doesn't make unscientific twaddle any more plausible, and socio-demographic stuff is a totally different kettle of fish, with no bearing whatsoever on the hard sciences that chemistry and physics are.
Repeatable experiments are what lend credence to new developments, however implausible they may seem. Comments like yours do not.
A few things I would like to say.
@ Amanfromearth vs AC "peer review". - Neither of the links come from peer reviewed journals. The Purdue Uni paper is unpublished. Also it doesn't have any mathematics in it at all to back up anything that is written. The author makes bold statements without reference to the actual calculations used to predict temperatures where reaction could occur for example. The blogspot article has maths to back it up and relevant observations of misleading/misunderstood basic scientific principles from the inventor.
As per title, what the hell is a pseudo sceptic? somebody who doesn't believe, but really they do because they are faking their disbelief? And if they are a debunker that implies some form of historical success at debunking, meaning that they have already achieved their goal.
If anything it is the attitude and fanaticism of the supporters that make me think this is a hoax. When people bring emotions into physics you know that they are either clueless or fraudsters.
Back around '97 the dear old SMH reported breathlessly on a homegrown talent who had apparently produced a codec capable of sending full screen full motion video and audio over a dialup modem link.
Of course no technical details could be disclosed or anything seen other than a staged demo with no opportunity to kick the tyres offered, because of pending patent applications and confidential talks with potential investors etc. etc.
15 years later I'm still waiting for this technology to arrive. Funny, that.
> a codec capable of sending full screen full motion video and audio over a dialup modem link.
H.324 was designed to do exactly that task - although I'd have to get a marketroid to make the "full screen full motion" claim.
But I certainly achieved 15fps QCIF over a V.34 modem. And that was my goal.
Vic.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/06/cold-fusion-heating-up?page=1
The really interesting part, as Wired says, is that Rossi isn't asking for random investors to put money in. Instead he's selling them on approval. If the buyers find they don't work, they hand them back and don't pay for them, and all they've lost is some engineering time. This isn't your typical scam behaviour. Of course the early buyers could be shills, or perhaps there are no early buyers at all (we can't see Rossi's bank accounts, after all). Still though, if it's a con then he's working on the scale of global megacorps or national governments, who (a) can afford the losses, and (b) have the resources to nail him to the wall if they find they've been screwed over.
Here's what I'm confused by. If Rossi won't allow peer review before he gets a patent, why is he happy to sell units before he gets a patent. Surely there is ample scope for reverse engineering?
If the US Navy was indeed his first customer, I would imagine the unit is already in little bits, being scrutinized by their top people.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/more-fizzer-than-fusion-so-dicks-not-energised-20120114-1q0fv.html
"Sol Millin, a local retiree and founder of The Byron New Energy Charitable Trust, spoke first, hoping to convince investors. But when it was time for the link-up, the phone didn't ring. And it didn't ring.
Mr Millin told The Sun-Herald: ''I thought it was better if Dr Rossi rang us. He is a very important man and a very busy man and I didn't want to keep him waiting.''
But they had their wires crossed, their timing out of sync. Each was expecting the other to call."
Hahaha.
If you had a "makes energy from nothing" box that you'd invented would you:
a) Keep it close to your chest and work your cobs off touting for a bit money from punters for "futher development" of it.
b) Demonstrate it working under scientifically controlled conditions, show how it works, become overnight the richest and most famous man on the entire bloody planet and never have to work again?
So he's either very stupid or a con artist then. As very stupid people don't tend to come up with astonishingly clever inventions, Occam's razor says con.
I'm amazed that no one has mentioned THE go-to website for all things LENR and an intelligent, reasonably skeptical investigator named Steven Krivit. If you want science, rather than ill-informed opinion and blathering egos, this is the place to go. He has extensively investigated Rossi and shown him to be a fraud.
The website is http://www.newenergytimes.com/ and is a must for anyone seriously investigating this, very real, phenomenon. Its not cold fusion, but that doesn't mean there's not something very interesting happening.
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