Slashdot Mirror
Does Italian Demo Show Cold Fusion, or Snake Oil?
An anonymous reader writes "Today, Wired.co.uk is running a story, 'Cold fusion rears its head as "E-Cat" research promises to change the world.' It gives an overview of the technology that claims to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper, with no radioactive by-products, to produce copious amounts of heat, inexpensively, with a 1 megawatt plant scheduled to come on line later this month. Apparently, Wired was not aware that today is a big test in Italy by scientists from around the world, who will be observing the technology in operation, including self-looped mode. A real-time update page has been set up at PESWiki, which has been a primary news provider of this technology since it was announced last January." Wired's article is remarkably optimistic. I'd love for this to be true, but many decades of scientific-looking free-energy machine scams make it hard to be other than cynical; the claim of a secret catalyst which "can be produced at low cost," controlled-access for outside observers, the lack of published science to explain the claimed effect, and skepticism even from the free-energy world — along with a raft of pro-E-Cat websites registered anonymously earlier this year — all make it sound like this follows the marketing style of previous "over unity" / perpetual motion machines. I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.
Most of the world operates on first-to-file, not first-to-invent. If you had a working "secret sauce", how insane would you have to be to not file a zillion patents on it? Protecting such inventions is exactly what the patent system is actually for.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You really find a lack of skepticism about global warming out there? Rather, despite more skepticism than about any other topic in current science, 98% of scientists with expertise in the field conclude that anthropogenic global warming is a major threat to our species.
Sometime you might try skepticism about skepticism. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. A skepticism that's promoted by a PR firm working for the oil companies, that previously promoted skepticism about tobacco and cancer on behalf of the tobacco companies, is a good target for skepticism about skepticism. Or do you believe that loading up the lungs with tobacco is health, too, just as you apparently believe that loading up the atmosphere with CO2 is benign?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Rossi does not want your money. He has solely funded all development of the e-cat with his own money: He has sold a company he owned, and he has now even sold his house. Peswiki asked him if they should set up a donation site for him, but rossi does not want that too. He also does not want to apply for FP7-ENERGY, a european research program for energy.
So Rossi either is a completely self-deluded man that manages to delude lots of other people around him as well, or he really has something working.
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