A Cold Look at Cold Fusion Claims: Why E-Cat Looks Like a Hoax

In the past few days, several readers have submitted word of a paper published on Arxiv allegedly confirming the efficacy of Andrea Rossi's "E-Cat," a device Rossi says transmutes nickel into copper, producing cheap energy in the process. (Mentioned before on Slashdot.) Ethan Siegel of ScienceBlogs takes a skeptical look at the buzz surrounding this paper, and asks some seemingly obvious questions, pointing out various ways in which the cold-fusion / cheap-energy claims could be either confirmed or debunked. First time accepted submitter CdXiminez writes with a capsule of Siegel's points: "What would it take to convince a reasonable observer that you've got a controlled nuclear reaction going on here? Things not shown in the earlier report: Show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place; Start the device operating by whatever means you want, then disconnect all external power to it, and allow it to run; Place a gamma-ray detector around the device; Accurately monitor the power drawn from all sources to the device at all times, while also monitoring the energy output from the device at all times."

Comments

Re:Sad legitimate researchers

[lxs]

If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes...

True. I for one would be worried about getting hit by one of those flying pigs.

An easy solution

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If they want to know if the E-Cat works, why don't they just measure it with an E-meter?

Re:W.C Fields was an optimist

[nitehawk214]

Actually it's not PT Barnum either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_minute

Your URL makes it sound like the quote is "There's 27 suckers born every minute."

Must be due to inflation.