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Independent Researchers Test Rossi's Alleged Cold Fusion Device For 32 Days
WheezyJoe (1168567) writes The E-Cat (or "Energy Catalyzer") is an alleged cold fusion device that produces heat from a low-energy nuclear reaction where nickel and hydrogen fuse into copper. Previous reports have tended to suggest the technology is a hoax, and the inventor Andrea Rossi's reluctance to share details of the device haven't helped the situation. ExtremeTech now reports that "six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden" have "observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, "far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume."... "The researchers, analyzing the fuel before and after the 32-day burn, note that there is an isotope shift from a "natural" mix of Nickel-58/Nickel-60 to almost entirely Nickel-62 — a reaction that, the researchers say, cannot occur without nuclear reactions (i.e. fusion)." The paper (PDF) linked in the article concludes that the E-cat is "a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible. Nevertheless we have to relate to the fact that the experimental results from our test show heat production beyond chemical burning, and that the E-Cat fuel undergoes nuclear transformations. It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation, but the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding. Moreover, the E-Cat results are too conspicuous not to be followed up in detail. In addition, if proven sustainable in further tests the E-Cat invention has a large potential to become an important energy source." The observers understandably hedge a bit, though: The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”
Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'll wait for the next paper...
This is exciting news, this could be the "Well, thats strange, WTF is going on here" that heralds discoveries. The overly optimistic explanation is not "cold fusion", it is "New Physics".
Please see: http://www.science20.com/a_qua...
Not quite as clean a confirmation as one would like: " It would be like if I asked you to believe that by putting a dollar bill in a special laundry machine and spinning it for half an hour with some special detergent the dollar turns into a $1000 note. You are allowed to watch the machine as it does its work, but it is me who opens it and extracts the bill when it has finished its magic conversion. I doubt you would buy it."
If it sounds too good to be true...
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
if these confirmers are reputable, who are they? Funny how no names are mentioned.
I don't want to do a sig now
subject says it all....not to mention this story was just posted already.
Read the report. The names are at the top.
Giuseppe Levi - Bologna University, Bologna, Italy
Evelyn Foschi - Bologna, Italy
Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér - Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Hanno Essén - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Unfortunately, Levi is a long time acquaintance of Rossi, so his independence is hard to justify.
The most glaring of which is there was no proper measurement of heat output - just computed from IR output.
is indistinguishable from a Rigged Demo. Or in this case, Rossi is counting on the inverse.
We've long been down this road. Rossi refuses to let anyone see how the thing works. He refuses to allow input monitoring (i.e. the Ecat is always plugged into an external power source, and he refuses to allow an ampmeter to be run on it).
He's also never shown the interior of the Ecat, so there's no verification of the fuel being any different between start and finish of the run. In fact, the concentration of Copper isotopes after the run is suspiciously identical to naturally occurring copper.
He's also never explained why there are no gamma radiation dangers, despite the physics which say that if the reaction he claims is going on, anyone within 10 meters for more than a few minutes should die of radiation poisoning.
Really, folks, this nothing more than a charlatan peddling his wares to folks. Any "scientist" who values his reputation shouldn't come with 100 miles of this guy. And shame on Slashdot for even publishing this claim. What, we're next going to entertain claims of people who say they can transform Lead to Gold with only this special black-box machine?
Oh, and ExtremeTech is about as reliable for this kind of reporting as The Daily Mail.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
If it were really true, this would be the news story of all ages all over the planet. But it's not. It's a hoax.
No. Lobbyists and the lawyers that drive the lobbying process. Congresscritters seem to be almost uniformly clueless.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Two reasons really. First because the thought of a group of sceptical experts scratching their heads in disbelief is too delicious to resist, but mainly because it would mean that the undesirable element who spend so much time stealing copper wire to sell on the black market would be stymied by the drop in the value of copper. I guess they would resort to stealing nickel.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Why is this nonsense getting the time of day here? I know the editorial staff doesn't exactly check the sources or the grammar but this article doesn't even pass a sniff test. Why is slashdot giving an obvious charlatan the time of day? "reputable researchers"? Please...
... against Exxon on the off chance this paper would turn out well. I see that I am up 30% in the last week or two.
I read the paper on Friday. Its nicely done. First calibrate the measurement process without fuel; then add fuel and repeat. Provides measurements for the error bars as well as the output. The only thing I'm a bit confused about is the composition of the fuel. I don't see how it is quantitatively described. The isotope shifts are really interesting. It seem the Lithium is donating neutrons and the Nickel is acquiring them, but I wasn't able to see if there was a balance between the two processes. Previously there has been a suggestion that the Nickel gets transmuted into Copper (which also has an isotope with atomic weight 62), but that wasn't measured here.
It was good to see people measuring and presenting results without detracting from the results by asserting that they knew was 'obviously' causing everything.
A total of 1.5MW Hours over 32 days = just under 2kilowatt hours continuous for the 768 hours in 32 days.
Or about one wall socket.
Bet it's plugged into the wall.
Look it's pretty simple. If you claim to have a DT reaction, you need to detect neutrons. Fleischmann and Pons lied about detecting neutrons. There was no fusion reaction.
He's tried patenting it in three different jurisdictions:
Italy, the EU, and the US.
The latter two rejected the claim outright, with choice phrases like "seems to violate the understanding of basic physical processes" and "fails to provided enough of a concrete implementation to judge for patentablity", and "application does not describe a workable device".
It got the Italian one, simply because he applied for a non-technical patent, and it was reviewed by someone who merely looked at the form, and didn't analyze the device. It's well-known in Italy that this form of patent is called "God's Gifts", because they're pretty much indistinguishable from miracles in terms of reproducability.
Relying on Trade Secrets for this kind of invention is the #1 indicator of fraud. A proper patent would make him rich beyond his imagination. A Trade Secret is only good for fleecing investors.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Reproducible results means someone else can build the device and get the same results. Unless that happens it's a hoax.
if these confirmers are reputable,
They aren't any more.
Seriously, the number of things they do wrong is huge, starting with the oxymoron of an "open calorimeter", which is what they have tried to build.
The odds of this result being experimental error are far, far higher than the odds that any new physics are involved.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Please take the contents of the device into a spectrometer and tell me what elements or isotopes were created in the process.
and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
There were preprints of both the P&F paper and Steve Jones' papers circulating the day after the press conference. They were sufficiently detailed to reproduce what P&F had done (the Jones paper was much sparser) and there was no clear statement of any "loading" requirement. There were a few cases reported where "loading" seemed to have occurred, but there was nothing like an unequivocal two month loading period.
Your comment implies that P&F ever described "the experimental protocol" but of course they never did any such thing. They described a whole range of things, and then claimed anyone who didn't get their results hadn't done it right.
Furthermore, as we dug into the work, it became more an more obvious that phenomenologically for the P&F result to be correct then both a) all of chemistry had to be wrong and b) all of nuclear physics had to be wrong. The work as reported was full of contradictions.
Koonin is on the right side of history with this "crime". P&F were wrong. They were wrong then. They remain wrong today. There have been no reproducible excess heat production experiments that have withstood ordinary academic scrutiny. The intriguing possibility of solid-state fusion has not been realized (more's the pity).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
No, they didn't. (Measure all the inputs).
They looked at the instruments set up by Rossi. One of the biggest suspicions is that the Ampmeter is measuring only the current between hot and neutral leads on the input cable, and that the "earth" line is actually being used to supply power.
Once again: they merely observed a device set up by Rossi. They had to take his word that all the instruments were set up correctly, and that they did what he said they did. Even the new round of "testing" isn't actual testing. So there's no verification that it did anything that Rossi said it does.
It's like trusting David Copperfield that his escape box is merely an "ordinary box".
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
If I understand correctly, the devices produces energy without radioactive waste. That should be enough to drive huge interest, even if we do not understand how it happens.
He cheated on demonstrations in the past, for example by mixing up the definitions of wet and dry steam (turning a certain amount of water into dry steam takes far more energy then turning it into wet steam), by using DC current to heat and using a clamp-meter (that can only measure AC) to show that no current was flowing, etc. He also seems to have a knack for finding exceptionally careless or easy to fool "researchers" and "engineers".
My guess is that he either managed to taint the experimental set-up, or that he exchanged the device in order to fake the appearance of fusion. He might also have managed to put pressure on one or several of the scientists to have them fake the results. He managed to pressure some Italian physics professor before (now conveniently deceased). All these things are obviously far, far easier than producing cold fusion, and radioactivity-less cold fusion at that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So it output a ridiculous amount of energy. That means it works. Just because they can't understand it doesn't mean it doesn't work. I don't care if it uses nuclear fusion or elf magic. It does exactly what it was supposed to do so why don't scientists stop making fun of it and build a power plant using it. If I invented the single most money-making device in over a century, exceeding even personal computers, I wouldn't open source the specs even if I had an established patent. China would just steal it a decade sooner. I'd keep that sucker so top secret, I'd have $100 billion company before anyone figured out how it worked.
"We're confused and don't like the person personally" it not a sufficient reason to not take the device seriously. We were using quantum effects and technology before scientists figured out how and why it worked. Same thing here.
The next few weeks could be very interesting indeed. According to one report at Sifferkoll, a big bank downloaded the new E-Cat report just minutes after it was made available online — and “oil futures have stayed volatile since.” And of course this morning Glasgow University announced that it would be selling its fossil fuel investments. Hmm
<sigh /> All about those Benjamin's.
in particular, the history of perpetual motion machines: "inventors", aka charlatans, were unbelievably clever in designing what appeared to be Perp Mot Machines
the idea that you can fuse H and Ni to form Cu at less then, roughly, 10^7 deg C is absurd
it is like someone claiming that they can run a mile in 10 seconds; it is just not credible; even if you see someone do that with your own eyes, you know there is trickery involved
As seen here...
Regardless of whether Nickle to Copper fusion can occur in the conditions that Rossi claims for the Ecat, the input and output of "fuel" isn't in line with what would happen.
That is, given what his input Nickel fuel is, the output "spent" fuel after the run would look radically different than what Rossi has shown.
In fact, his "spent fuel" looks very much like: he went out and put together a fuel rod from commerically-available Nickel and Copper, and didn't bother to do the actual Physics behind what the Isotope ratio should be, then just pulled this "fuel rod" out of the device to "prove" it worked.
Also, as pointed out by the article, if his Ecat worked as he claims, everyone would be dead within 10 minutes of starting the reactor, due to massive Gamma radiation leaks.
One can claim that low-temperature fusion is happening, for some reason we don't understand. But then you can't go on and claim that the actual fusion process is somehow different than all possible combinations using your input and output elements.
Since Rossi's still alive to peddle his snake oil, it's plainly, well, snake oil.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
"Menstrual flow might occur every 21 to 35 days and last two to seven days."
Just google that.
"Unfortunately, Levi is a long time acquaintance of Rossi, so his independence is hard to justify."
And raises the question of experimenter's bias. (ie: confirmation bias)
Everybody here seems to be fixated on discussing how much of a hoax it is and how it is perpetrated.
I suggest a different approach. Assume it is real, carefully analyse all available details, double interview the witnesses, find out what the next step is, knowing full well he is a private party fully due his privacy, including his unpatented (or unpatentable) design. I design stuff all the time and refuse to patent it on the basis the first in line to clone it illegally would be the Iranians. No thanks.
There are regulations against just hooking to the grid and making your meter run backwards. It is contrary to the interests of the grid owners. Check it out.
He might be able to service military bases for UPS or black sites, or aluminum smelters, but then someone would have to believe it is actually happening first. Based on this site alone it MUST be a hoax, right? Right?
JJ
if these confirmers are reputable, who are they?
Their names were mentioned. I believe they have been associates of Rossi's for years.
Indeed. And they got what they deserved.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Reputable" probably means having published things in an equally "reputable" journal, maybe the one Rossi owns!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not another cold fusion claim ... smh!
Because despite what you might believe, the process hasn't been debunked.
Right. That's why they are not publishing the results in reputable scientific journals for peer review. That's why power companies are not funding this. If this was real then companies would be throwing serious money at it if it even had a modest hope of being a commercially viable power source. While I'm open minded that real breakthroughs in some new power technology are possible, I also know what a scam looks like when I see one.
If this is real then the burden of proof is on the "inventor". Since the "inventor" is not forthcoming then the default position is that it is hokum until proven otherwise.
There are theories on why it might be fake, and theories on how it could be real.
Which means precisely nothing unless subjected to proper scientific scrutiny. Theories without serious scrutiny are nothing more than science fiction.
But you contradict yourself. If (as you said yourself) that he could not get a patent, then trade secret is his only real protection.
There is no contradiction. If he could not get a patent it is because his "invention" is a scam. It's demonstrably not hard to get a patent these days. A trade secret is only helpful if there is actually something to protect. This guy couldn't get a patent because his "invention" couldn't even pass the most basic scrutiny.
The nuclear binding energy graph shows how much energy is needed/available for a particular nucleon and Ni* is on the downwards slope from Iron to Uranium so it absorbs energy in getting heavier not release it.
Graph of energies
If this thing turns out to work it will upset a whole lot of apple carts and I am not only talking about the obvious energy sector ones. But projects like ITER go to hell. Patent offices would be forced to use their brains. And then worst of all a whole lot of very smart people with very respectable degrees would have to say, "Not only was that not invented in a prestigious institution by a prestigious graduate who was funded by a prestigious grant giving organization, but we don't have a clue as to how the magic works."
But the real problem with his project is basically that after the last cold fusion debacle nobody will touch that with a 20 foot pole. Basically if you want to work on cold fusion the closest would be to try and get a grand for "Alternate forms of neutron emission for the detection of hidden explosives." To associate your reputation and name with cold fusion would be roughly equal to associating it with paranormal studies. So even if you have a pet theory that you have in a bottom drawer that perfectly meshes with what this guy is doing would you dare take the risk and back this guy?
It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation, but the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding.
Men don't really understand woman and women don't really understand men, but we still want to date each other and the results are not always unsatisfying. For fuck's sake, people didn't know how aspirin worked for (how long?) but still took it for pain and headaches simply because it worked (well).
Build one of these things for small-scale production. If it generates net energy, back-date a patent for this guy. I'd rather see some tax dollars going toward trying something that may fail, than paying Congress' to jerk-off for another year playing piss-ant politics.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Thanks for that. Do you happen to know if someone using this to measure some fancy multi-phase AC would also see the DC, without specifically looking for it?
Giuseppe Levi
Baloney University, Bologna, Italy
Not a direct quote but close enough.
Given a choice between making $400k a year (minus operating and maintenance expenses, which we have no idea of) and potentially making billions off an invention, which would you choose?
There is no invention and thus there is no choice. This is no different however than the scam artists who sell courses on how to get rich selling houses or investing in the stock market rather than actually doing it themselves. They know there is no money in actually doing what they are selling but there is money in convincing gullible people to give them money.
I'm just saying that there is no reason to think he's a hoax just based on his business strategy.
Yes there is. I've worked in and with private equity. I've done fund raising for real companies. I know how real companies do this and you can be sure that this is NOT how honest people sell an invention. This is how a scam artist works. If this were real he would be able to march into any private equity firm on the planet and they would absolutely throw money at him after some due diligence.
Looks like a lot of Bologna.
I'll see myself out.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
Explain that part about explaining inputs and outputs being "meaningless".
Because if you cannot see the entire process there is ample room for fraud. I can hand you a black box that you plug into the wall of your house which will emit more power than you put in. Have I invented some magic box? No. It means that I have a battery in the box that I won't let you examine.
If you hand me something that seems to violate the known laws of physics you had better be able to explain what is going on and/or be very transparent about what you've found. Anything else just screams scam.
Since the machine needs to be charged with fuel for each run and the fuel changes isotopic composition by the end of the run, your objections as to "perpetual machines" are moot and misplaced.
If you believe that then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
These experts haven't figured it out. They are not exactly idiots. Google them.
Are you certain these "experts" are actually independent observers? You are being FAR to credulous.
Why is it so fucking hard to get a team of reputable people, using a well designed experiment, test this thing? MIT? Cal Tech? Who the fuck are these "six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden"?
All we have is secrecy and vagueness from one side and snark and arrogance from the other.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Which of course is exactly what a lot of people told me here on Slashdot when I wrote that we really don't have any evidence it's a hoax, so let's just wait and see.
We don't have any evidence that it is not a hoax. What we do have is a lot of behavior that looks exactly like what would be expected if it was a hoax.
But I was willing to wait for real evidence before screaming "Hoax!" to the heavens, the way a lot of people here did.
Scams are nothing new and this has all the trappings of being one. If the "inventor" wants to follow real scientific procedures and provide real transparency into what he is doing then I'll do the sitting and waiting. But when someone is behaving exactly how I would expect a scam artist to behave then I'm going to scream "hoax" until proven otherwise.
"Erik" has posted at least a dozen times in this thread discrediting Rossi. I thinks "Erik" has stake in the E-Cat failing.
Has anyone ever asked the guy what he wants? Does he want a lot of money? Does he want fame? He's already got notoriety. Accolades? The guy has to want something.
Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion. Indeed, I'm virtually certain that when -- I said when not if some sort of new form of heat production is demonstrated in D-Pd systems to the satisfaction of even the Secretary of Energy and President of the APS, that they will still claim, as do you, that "Koonin is on the right side of history" by pointing to some error that F&P made somewhere.
They will then be so dismayed and puzzled at why a Western version of Pol Pot starts hauling them off to reeducation in the Western version of the rice paddies.
Seastead this.
In this case, the claimed energy density is far outside the realm of anything achievable by chemistry, so if it was real it would be prima-facie evidence of something non-chemical going on.
Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. First you would have to eliminate all possible causes including experimental error, measurement error and of course fraud. The results need to be reproducible by genuinely independent third parties and ALL parts of the apparatus need to be examined. Anything else should be regarded as attempted fraud.
Although I do agree that the claims being made are so extraordinary that even then it would be difficult to credit it as a real phenomenon.
It would be very easy to determine if it is real. One merely has to describe what was done and let other scientists have a go at it. Couldn't be easier.
Shearch for rossi in tbe document you will see he was theyre manipulating the test.
Why is this still being posted? Rossi has a background of being convicted for fraud. The "e-cat" scam has been going on for at least 6 years now with nothing at all to show for it. Not. One Single. Thing. There is even less chance of Rossi having developed a cold fusion device than there is of Moller successfully building an actual flying car.
Hey I've got an idea let's put Rossi's ecat into Moller's flying car and send both those a-holes to the moon.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
The PDF documents exactly the devices used to monitor input power
Which is proof of what exactly? How does that prove that all power inputs were accounted for? How does it prove that the power measuring device wasn't tampered with? That doesn't eliminate fraud, experimental or measurement error.
Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion.
Citation needed.
Levels of skepticism should be commensurate with the prior probability of something being true. In this case, people should be extremely skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
Of course, a proper scientific approach is not to dismiss something out of hand but nobody should be getting excited about such a claim until the claimant actually clearly demonstrates something to get excited over.
She's brilliant.
1.5 megawatt-hours (produced) from near complete converstion to the Nickel-62 isotope ?? How much material was involved ??. Fusion generates a HUGE amount of energy (when it actually happens) and 1.5 megawatt-hours really is not than much unless this 'reactor' and its component materials are very small.
And under what conditions (what was the 'gross' energy involved in this alleged "cold" fusion reaction ???)
Lets hear more when independant scientists/engineers confirm its (hoaxes are nothing new in this field).
If it true, the big issue he might have is that the basic principle of the reactor is not patentable. So he trying to get patents anyway with lot of details hidden so he find a way to patent something that might lock the basic idea of the device in some way. Imagine a device so simple that there could be DIY project to build your own... You might be able to patent a machine, but what if the actual process is so simple and not a particular machine is needed to do it. You could build over 1000 different machine that achieve the same reaction.
Most of the patent about converting heat to motion are expired, so that can't be patented. So for example, what if hydrogen at exactly X temperature for X amount of time with X component next to it would bind by itself and generate more heat. What can you really patent here ? Maybe a special temperature sensor, but someone could make one of those.
Another example is what if a simple frequency resonance of the hydrogen with the nicked caused a synchronized collision and binding effect generating heat. You could patent the device generating the resonance, but if someone else made a device that isn't the same as the patent, your screwed..
So if it reactor is real, this is probably the reason, the actual reaction can't be patented and protected in a way to make him the richest person on the planet.
Also, if it real, it would be pretty scary if it easy to build. Unlimited range drone that could fly under radar detection. Or just think the energy crisis that will happen and a shutdown of a huge economy... Though, it would be an amazing thing if every home could have one, and that it would be safe from an solar electromagnetic storm. I live in the north, and having a safe and self contain heat source generator would be amazing. Be able to run garden all year long without expensive protection as heat generation would be super cheap and isolation wouldn't be important. We could have super high power microwave machine to disintegrate stuff at, maybe even be able to clean water and having a close system. (Waste water could be evaporated to get the pure water, and the hard residue could be destroyed with the high power microwave I talked about and create pouch of organic matter that could either be reused ourself or sent to a processing facility.
Anyway, I over think as usual :)
I have arranged to sell my house and give all of that money to Rossi. Unlike President Obama, who I voted for, twice, I think Rossi can bring true hope and change to the world.
According to their isotopic analysis, the device should have been running out of reactant (whatever that amounts to) near the end of it's run. But not only does it continue to produce power consistently, it even increases in output when the concentration of reactants would have been reduced to a few percent of the starting mix.
Very mysterious, to put it mildly. No known chemical or nuclear reaction proceeds as (or more) efficiently as the concentration of reactants/fuel runs low.
Here's a Feb 2013 article that suggests a theory of that sounds like what's going on with Rossi's device (and it's not quackery):
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149090-nasas-cold-fusion-tech-could-put-a-nuclear-reactor-in-every-home-car-and-plane
I'm skeptical too, but just because this new experiment is unexplained does not make it invalid. It's only unexplained until it's explained.
Rossi's case is 0% different from professional sleight-of-hand.
You look at the photos and don't see any trickery.
I look at the photos and see tons of room for trickery.
If a real professional magician (who is an expert on miniature trickery) could look at the setup in person, it would be solved in less than 1 minute.
People allow themselves to have opinions on things they have not studied.
LENR is quite real, look at the MIT converence earlier this year.
LENR is quite reproducible. Transmutation is standard. Rossi's device uses one of the several different approaches that work.
This is clearly a religious issue for most people.
You have copypasta'd this comment more than once in this thread. I think you are Rossi trying to cast doubt on your being debunked.
How can anyone have a stake in it failing apart from perhaps hoping that taxpayers money doesn't get spent on it?
I don't know about Erik, but I'm personally still a bit pissed off about my government putting millions towards a scam of a car running on water and a spaceport project that ended up being two people in a suburban office, neither with experience, education or connections in that field.
1. I think everyone should be skeptical of this device, at this time
2. Given Rossi's access to the device there is the possibility of slight of hand being used to switch input or output materials (the NI and Li "fuel" and "ash")
3. Given Rossi's refusal to allow independent examination of the "reactor" construction is extraordinarily suspect, but not conclusive to fraud
4. Given the outcomes of this experiment, an isolated (in some sort of chamber away from any human contact) test of the device with a proper calorimeter is the next logical step.
5. Rossi should be allowed to observe the isolated test and verify proper setup of the reactor via closed circuit video and all interactions with the equipment be made by independent persons operating robotic controls to charge the reactor and perform the calorimetric test.
6. All equipment besides the reactor should be x-rayed and verified by no less than three independent parties having electrical engineering and/or physics PhDs on site before items are sealed in isolation.
7. All power supplied to the equipment and to the chamber itself should be monitored by equipment that is also verified by the same independent experts on site prior and during the testing.
8. At the conclusion of the test all equipment should be re-verified
9. The "ash" from the reactor should be removed robotically and moved from isolation for testing without any direct human contact between isolation chamber and testing equipment
Without having a schematic or any other information about the "reactor" it is very difficult to verify the veracity of Rossi's claims. There are clear procedures for publication and protection of inventions that Rossi refuses to follow and that is probably the most disturbing and suspect thing about the "invention". His ardent refusal to publish the device's workings is what makes this whole thing about as believable as unicorns. If Rossi himself doesn't know exactly how it works, but it somehow proves to do so, then his trepidation may be justified. We shall see.
This test was not in Rossi's facility. it was at an unrelated Swedish company that offered their facility and that the researchers selected. If you bothered to read the report, you would have known that the facility, power, etc was not supplied by Rossi.
You seem to not know who the researchers are. Hell, one of them is the former head of the Swedish Skeptics Society. Do some research before you embarrass yourself.
Here's the thing - the researchers are not allowed to look at it, they are only allowed to look at the outside.
It reminds me of the Horvarth "water car" scam. The area around the car was roped off but a chemical engineer looking at it lay on the ground and could see a bright red hydrogen gas cylinder under the engine before he was taken away by a security guard. That wasn't enough to stop taxpayers money going into the scam.
This is why he's recognized. E=mc2 is minor. GR is the true genius part.
Einstein's Nobel prize was for the photo-electric effect and not for GR. Einstein could easily have received 4 Nobel prizes: for SR, GR, Photo-electric and his explanation of Brownian motion. This is why he is recognized as a genius, more so than those who actually have won multiple Nobels.
One error in the original story is that this is a transmutation into Copper. That concept/claim is several years out of date, this new report which included spectroscopic analysis before and after the 32 day run shows Li 7 -> Li 6, along with Ni 58 and Ni 60 to Ni 62 (which happens to be the most stable known element, with the highest binding energy per nucleon of any known nuclide).
If you read the report, and various subsequent discussions, basically there are only two questions at the moment:
Did Rossi, under the watchful eye of the researchers who were collecting the samples, manage some sleight of hand and manipulate the fuel?
If he manipulated the fuel, how did he manipulate the power levels that were being supplied by a third part in a location he had no control over, while the researchers very carefully looked for power issues due to the past criticism from the previous report.
The other thing to bear in mind is that this is not your Daddy's cold fusion. LENR has been repeatedly proven in many studies over the past few years. MIT has been studying small scale LENR devices for several years now (see NANNOR). The U.S. Navy proved there was something going on several years ago. NASA has had great interest in it. Francesco Celani demoed an LENR device at National Instrument's convention several years ago. The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project has been running an open source, crowd sourced/funded, open science experiment with interesting results. Just because you haven't been keeping up with the legitimate research does not mean that research has not been happening. There are even several competing theories as to what is happening in all these experiments.
The only real mystery here is how Rossi is getting so much more energy out that these smaller scale experiments have been able to produce.
Years ago a US embassy was given a gift that did not contain a battery or any other power source. However in the presence of enough of a radio signal on a certain frequency it could induce enough current to drive a microphone and a transmitter, so could be used as a remote listening device.
If I was the hoaxer in question that's the sort of thing I would do with my secret black box since the power supposedly produced by fusion is tiny - extra points if it can do it with whatever a nearby phone tower is pumping out. There are also chemical means with reactions happening slowly and releasing a bit of heat, bonus points if the isotopes expected from fusion are locked into something that slowly dissolves.
For as long as it's a black box that is being kept secret from all experts it can't be trusted. If an expert with a good reputation signs an NDA and is allowed to actually look inside the thing then it's not longer equivalent to sleight-of-hand.
But if you could harvest the energy from the flame war on /. each time someone posts something about 'cold fusion', we surely would have solved some global energy problems!
Check the author list against the last "verification" from 2013.
On the other hand at under half a kg even if the entire device was some sort of chemical fuel generating an excess megawatt-hour of energy would imply an energy density in excess of 7200MJ/kg. Compare that to the ~50MJ/kg of various petroleum distillates, or 140MJ/kg for hydrogen - the excess energy is far in excess of chemical sources. That leaves a few options to my mind:
1) The device actually works (which, yes, implies that our understanding of fusion is incomplete and sir hoax-a-lot actually has something real this time)
2) There's hidden low-neutron emission fissionable material in the device and it's actually a compact radiothermic generator producing ~1.3kWh in some manner that can be varied with electrical input. (which would likely be an incredibly valuable and physics-busting invention in it's own right)
3) It's doing something to hide the fact that it's actually drawing 3x as much power as is being measured
4) Actual heat emissions are 3x lower than the values calculated from the surface temperature.
Those are the only options that I see. I would have been much happier if they had done a proper calorimeter test with a high-speed oscilloscope monitoring the incoming power, but as skeptical as I am this is starting to look like it just might be the real thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The earliest example (other than F&P's own work on calorimetry which was not, despite loud protestations about their admittedly flawed work on other nuclear products, ever "discredited" -- although it was erroneously criticized to high heaven) was Richard Oriani's replication "CALORIMETRIC MEASUREMENTS OF EXCESS POWER OUTPUT DURING THE CATHODIC CHARGING OF DEUTERIUM INTO PALLADIUM"" which was approved by Nature's own peer reviewers for publication in late 1989. Nature didn't publish it because -- and you'll have to forgive my invocation of Popper's notion of falsifiability here -- the American editor of Nature (the British editor considered it too hot to handle so he passed the buck to the US editor) the experimental results violated physical theory -- and yes, he actually told Oriani that. Theocracy rules.
Once Nature had violated the most basic principles of science in its editorial posture toward so-called "cold fusion" it could never again accept such a paper for review as it would risk, once again, approval from their own peer reviewers.
Seastead this.
From your link, in the conclusions.
Since no nuclear manifestations were observed in this work, we do not assert that the excess power and energy that we have measured is the result of nuclear fusion.
No neutrons, no fusion.
Of course aviation engineers know that a bumble bee can fly - your example is just a pop culture distortion of an engineer stating that we don't know enough to make something fly the same way as a bumble bee.
Good grief. Absence of assertion isn't assertion of absence. More importantly, if you aren't allowed to publish experiments that falsify theory -- in this case the theory that excess heat in nuclear quantities cannot be produced in the absence of so-called "nuclear manifestations" -- then what's the point of pretending to have a scientific method?
Seastead this.
It doesn't matter if the names are reputable. It only matters if the results are reproducible. That's getting to the heart of Nullius in verba.
If a scientist comes to you and says, "trust me, I'm reputable," that's the exact moment you should be asking how you can reproduce the experiment yourself. It is also why he's having trouble getting papers published in actual reputable journals.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They performed the spectroscopic analysis using several methods (see the appendix for the details). The main finding seems to be Li 7 -> Li 6, and Ni 58 and Ni 60 to Ni 62 (which has the highest binding energy of any nuclide).
By conspiracy theories, if he did invent it, the gas companies would have him whacked. He's still alive hence it's a hoax. I can't release anymore details, you'll just have to take my word for it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When disproving a well tested and verified theory, you need to present lots of proof.
There is no evidence of nuclear by products. This rules out all well known and well tested reaction processes.
There is no analysis of the composition of the ash. If you claim to fuse hydrogen you better show helium is abundances beyond naturally occurring rates after with natural abundances before.
There is no provided theoretical framework to explain the results that disagree with the well tested and verified accepted theories.
In sum total, this is bad science. Thus in the absence of any evidence in support of their claims, we can only conclude that the results they showed are the result of bad experimental procedure. The fact that scientists behind this were discredited is a triumph of the scientific method.
Set aside the de/merits of this study of Rossi's E-Cat device. Instead, focus on Rossi's behavior over the past four years.
From New Energy Times:
...Rossi responded to our and other scientific critiques, saying that he didn’t need scientific validation and that he would go directly into commercial production of a working 1 MW reactor...[Rossi] wrote on his blog, “We have arrived at a product that is ready for market...If somebody has a valid technology...he has to make a reactor that works and go and sell it, as we are doing."...A year later, on Feb. 17, 2012, he wrote on his blog, “In Autumn we will surely send the detailed offers to all the horde of pre-orderers. The deliveries will start hopefully within the next winter, surely within 18 months.”...There is no evidence that Rossi has produced and delivered a single working commercial reactor...Despite the fact that Rossi abandoned his attempt to obtain scientific credibility years ago in favor of delivering a commercially available reactor that has yet to materialize, he has gone back to seeking scientific validation. It’s been four years; there is still no truly independent scientific confirmation of Rossi’s claim [nor any fulfillment of preorders as promised 2-1/2 years ago.]
The article says the actual paper is being posted, but doesn't link to it. Anyone have a link?
The last time I looked at this, it appeared that the thing requires input power to function, and the input power is provided in a "proprietary waveform", even though it's just used for resistance heating. Other "free energy" schemes have turned out to be fake because measuring the wattage of a funny waveform is tricky, especially when current and voltage are out of phase. So I'm a bit suspicious.
Perpetual Motion violates the laws of physics - can't be done, so any patent application is bogus, either wrong or fraudulent, not worth wasting time on.*
Cold Fusion might or might not be possible - the scientific community at large hasn't seen a valid description of the physics or chemistry, and without somebody understanding the science, it's extremely unlikely that they'll engineer a successful implementation by tinkering around, and unlikely that somebody who's keeping the science a "trade secret" has actually done real science, as opposed to waving their hands around in ways that seem pleasing to their scientifically untrained eye, and the mere fact that they haven't blown themselves up isn't proof that it works.
* ("Free energy" is a different case - it usually refers to quackery, but sometimes is used to refer to things like taking advantage of heat differences in the ocean or earth or other things that you might be able to engineer usefully into a long-term economically viable power source, but probably can't.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
THEY WERE NOT ALLOWED TO LOOK INSIDE IT.
Was that obvious enough or do I have dumb down "not being allowed to properly examine the device" a bit more?
So Mr. Anonymous doesn't like the fact that I started with the earliest example of scientific misconduct of the authorities. Most likely he dislikes it because it is so damning of his theocracy. I could provide a list of peer reviewed papers, none of which have had even the slightest criticism raised against them in any specific way -- just the blanket condemnation of the rioting mob calling itself the APS.
However, it's probably better to have Los Alamos nuclear chemist Ed Storms's peer reviewed paper published in the German counterpart of the British "Nature" (since, as we have already seen "Nature" is corrupt):
Status of Cold-Fusion (2010)
Seastead this.
Until it's published in a serious peer-reviewed journal, I'll hold judgement.
Some PDF of a website isn't really good enough. When it's peer reviewed by a major journal and repeated, then I might be interested. Until then I don't believe a word.
soylentnews.org
Independence doesn't really mean anything. Objectivity does. You don't have to be independent to be objective.
The problem here is the observers are kept from having a close enough look to be able to tell if it really did put out that power or not.
"Hanno Essén, born September 27, 1948, is an associate professor of theoretical physics and a lecturer at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and former chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society." At least looks promising.
I don't get why people are so incredibly negative towards a report that shows something positive?
OK, I get that people are afraid of being fooled but why do you let that fear stop you from investigating this?
For me, I'm curious and I've done a lot of reading on this subject and it's very fascinating. If you are curious too, and not just afraid of being wrong, then I suggest you start by going to http://www.lenr-info.com/ and check out which companies, researchers and theories are related to LENR. (Not my web site). My favorite theory is Widom-Larsen, really worth checking out!
It's not like Andrea Rossi is alone in this... He may not even be first to market.
Any sufficiently advanced hoax is indistinguishable from technology.
...they also believed in Cold Fusion in the 80s.
Thanks slashdot for posting the article, it is certainly not an easy subject to write about.
I do however not agree on the following sentence. : "From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible."
There is a lot of systems and experiments where excess heat is formed and where there are transmutations taking place.
If people knew that- it would probably be easier to swallow the claims in this report (which is not easy for those really old school)
/ Peace
www.drboblog.com
Cold Fusion Revolution
Units. It's over a MONTH. And a megawatt isn't as big as you think, single seat jet fighters from England in the 1950s used an engine that gives up to twenty megawatts when you get it to spin a generator. That's nearly fifteen thousand megawatt hours if you keep it running all month.
Getting the idea now? Modern jet engines are most definitely not nuclear but can produce a vast amount more power than those old Avon jet engines used for standby power, and those tiny little Avon jets are pumping out nearly ten thousand times the power of this thing. So the Avon needs a fuel line - so what - this thing could have one too because nobody is allowed to get a close enough look to see if any of those tubes running in are carrying fuel.
Based on the paper, I'd say this thing is genuine, even if we don't understand how it works yet.
occam's razor is that just as with the first "independent" check this was actually not independent at all, was in Rossi lab with Rossi condition, and Rossi could have simply ordered some specific isotope and mixed it to make it looks like the ratio changed.
A true independent test is made in a lab own premise, with a machine they can watch and look for, and rossi not getting his finger on it at any point. THAT is an independent test. What we got is a second circus show. Oh sorry I meant "independent test". With big scary quotes.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Also those units are really weird - 1.5 megawatt hours over something around a 720 hour period, shouldn't that just be 2kW? An old fridge draws about that much power.
I haven't looked them up but it's quite possible they don't. It may have been very easy to get into the ASTM in the 1990s but do these guys even have that much? The point is moot since they were not allowed to measure properly, only allowed to witness a rigged demo.
Yes , yes , if you state that Nickel Hydrogen fusion is providing energy and no radiation (remember rossi is taking quasi no precaution) then you are breaking the known Ni H fusion process and making a new one. By the way Rossi was not aware of the isotopic process initially, and the sample "ashes" he gave had the normal isotopic ratio. Which made people call him rightfully a fraud, and other people try to come up a complex mechanism by which it could come. Funnily enough now that Rossi knows about isotopic ratio suddenly the new experiment (which is not an independent one for many reason) has different isotopic ratio. Why do i get the feeling if we dig a bit, somebody ordered from a isotope reseller different isotopic ratio for the end material ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Where's the shielding? If there are nuclear processes going on in that experiment then where is the shielding from alpha, beta, gamma radiation? Where is the neutron shielding? It's not there because it's not a nuclear reaction in the cell and its not a nuclear reaction because its a hoax.
Exactly the same bullshit claims were made by Pons and Fleischmann and the photos of the apparatus show exactly the same thing : claimed nuclear processes were going on with no shielding between experiment and experimenter.
This isn't an independent test because a) the lead investigator is a person friend of the "inventor" and b) the "inventor" was present during the experiment at the critical points where fraud could have taken place.
It looks and feels like a hoax because it is a hoax.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Quote the relevant portion to me please where they got to isolate it without Rossi there and check for extra inputs. How about where they got to be sure that the things they examined afterwards actually came out of it and not Rossi's hands? Sorry, there's so many things wrong here that mere hope is not enough to fox it.
It's a rigged demo. Just like Horvath and his water car. Whether it actually works or not can not be proven by a rigged demo. When the observers can't even bring their own measuring equipment that should ring pretty large alarm bells. A more open test could prove something, but this thing stinks on so many levels.
"In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic."
In serious scientific circles there would be no joke or taboo topics. Just experiments. Heavier than air flight was a joke topic. Even Lord Kelvin mocked the shit out of it. It's this sort of scientific elitism that perpetuates global warming. It's a "we're right, you're wrong, the science is settled" attitude.
That's because you, like most people, are inherently selfish. A better person would upload all the specs etc. onto the internet and free the world from oil dependency and moreover, dependency on a few multinationals. Hell, I bet you could live quite a comfortable life on the talk show circuit afterwards anyway. Who the hell needs billions upon billions?
"In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic." In science there shouldn't be any "jokes" or "taboos"; just experiments. Heavier than air flight was a joke too. Even Lord Kelvin mocked the shit out of the idea. Until the Wright Brothers came along. It's this scientific elitism that perpetuates the myth of AGW: the science is "settled." We "know" what is and isn't possible. Fuck off fake ass scientists who believe science works this way.
"...when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
I know science, magic & illusionism, I've been following this story from the very beginning and I am Italian, which helps in understanding Rossi more than you think. To me the hoax theory is less likely than the "new science" one.
Reduce it to an hour any you'll see where the misdirection lies.
Unfortunately, the whole thing is again more BS.
The paper and the "independent researchers" (who are in fact working with Rossi) are quite well debunked here:
http://shutdownrossi.com/e-cat...
http://news.newenergytimes.net...
Arxiv is *not* a peer-reviewed publication - anyone can submit anything there. So having a paper on Arxiv doesn't mean that it is any good.
Most were well known collaborators, known to Rossi over many years. This guy has spent jail time for fraud / tax evasion. He also had a company that could turn garden waste into high grade petrol! Amazing! Heres a great breakdown of the many (many) issues with this so called independent research... http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pap...
It's worth keeping in mind that the inventor supplied the devices that measured both the input and the output and the observers just had to take it on trust that they were reporting the correct numbers. It would be trivial for the "starting current" to just keep on going and drive 2kW resistance heater like these:
http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/electric-heating-element-2kw-heating-tube.html
Some of those would definitely fit in the form factor.
It's nice to dream but so many things here scream "rigged demo".
Now I've read the report and I've read the (nearly all completely negative) high-scoring posts. What strikes me is that almost anyone complaining obvously hasn't read and understood the report. Some quite obviously only read a few pages, if any, and most complainers and fraud-callers haven't made it to the appendix. Applying knee-jerk reactions to potential findings is not a proven and accepted scientific method.
Some claim that this would be an "energy from nothing"-machine - nobody said that. The scientists in the report stated in the report that the change in the isotopic distribution was more than enough to account for the surplus energy.
Some claim that they should have used DC, or that there must have been hidden wires somewhere. This claim came up after the first report, and in this second report the scientists took this possibility into account (measuring whether there is a DC offset anywhere). To me it looks like this and the double measurements they undertook are more than sufficient to give confidentiality into the data provided.
Some claim that the output heat should have been measured in a calometric bomb. But so far, in the tests about this kind of device (and similar ones from other sources - yes, there is not only a Mr. Rossi in this field), they "only" measured infrared and calculated radiation and convection energy. So if several different groups who have the one or other level of expertise in calorimetric measurements use IR instead of the calorimetric bomb, might it be that they had a reason to do this (and no, I'm mot saying that they are into the supposed "fraud"). The calorimetric bomb has its limits, and, beyond these limits, you have to rely on different, proven methods, which they did.
Some claim that it couldn't have happened because no radiation was found, as current theories require radiation to be present. Just like people once claimed that the sun could only burn for 5000 years, as there was absolutely no way for any reaction being able to provide that much power (they considered the suns' mass to be made up of burning coal). It took humanity some years to find out about that "nucelar power" thing that couldn't be explaind by the old theories.
Some claim that he only did that to trick investors to pay money for it. But he already HAS a large investor backing him, there is no need for more. And I doubt that the invester would hant to share him or his invention.
And no, this is NOT the same as Pons/Fleischman. Anyone claiming this is doing bullshit big time as he has not understand (or even read) a single page on the topic. Pons/Fleischman was about energy surplus while doing electrolysis of (heavy) water with palladium cathodes, and failed to reproduce because some key factors were incompletely presented. Mr. Rossis Ni/Cu reactor is something entirely different. Putting it in the same cathegory of "its fraud because we fail to understand it, and we don't want to understand it because it must be fraud" is not really a good scientific approach.
So, please keep the whole thing rational. If you think that this is all fraud, just show where the scientists in this experiment made mistakes. So far, all I've seen is quarterback-level reasoning along the lines of "I don't understand thingy, thingy is wrong". Get your acts together, act like engineers and scientists, or just shut up.
Yes. There are many industries that would gladly buy cheaper energy.
What does Rossi want? How is he going to monitize the thing (in his most optimistic scenario)? If he is not after money what does he want? Fame? He is pretty much guaranteed a place in history if that thing works. Nobel prize is inevitable, as are almost all other prizes and grants. At this point it would be hard for him not to be well off for the rest of his life. If it worked. He could go around giving speeches for top dollar. Almost any university would pay for him to tinker for the rest of his life with huge budget, just on the off chance he could come up with something similar.
Let's suppose for a minute that Rossi actually has a working device, and that he's been unfairly snubbed by the patent offices in major regions, and that he's trying to slowly build up his business from the bottom rather than get investors and go big quickly.
Where are his satisfied customers? According to the Wayback Machine he's had this thing on the market for three years. He was supposed to deliver 30-100 of them in 2012. Is there not one of his customers willing to say "I bought this thing and it works as advertised, and it's saved me a lot of money on my power bills?"
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
It isn't like Rossi is claiming "perpetual motion" here.
No, he's claiming "cold fusion" which is almost equally absurd based on all the actual scientific evidence we currently possess. If this was real the guy could publish the results and claim his Nobel prize. If this was real he could easily make more money than Scrooge McDuck.
Or violating any other known laws of physics.
No, he just isn't actually explaining ANY of the "physics" involved. There is nothing to evaluate because we cannot peek behind the curtain. Until we can peek behind the curtain we have to presume that it is a fraud. Real engineering and science cannot abide secrecy.
Seriously, I don't get why there are so many people here on slashdot arguing that this nonsense is in any way scientifically credible. I'm beginning to question whether slashdot is still filled with actual engineers who understand how the scientific process actually works.
Probably you're right but Rossi decided that he want to push the machine to the masses. So he decided the the case study is that: I build a giant factory and I sell Ecats in millions to the people to give people free energy. He wants o build a giant factory because he afraid that copycats will copy his after right after he publishes it. So he took the decision that if he build a large factory we will be miles ahead of his copycat rivals (probably Chinese). That are Rossi's thoughts not mine. So he is looking since then money from here and there to accomplish his terrible idea. Unfortunately Rossi isn't so good at marketing like he probably is in fusion or whatever it is. Rossi is an old story right now and I think that he is for very long time in the foreground to be a hoax. Till now they couldn't manage to reveal him. So I decided that because of his stupidity, if no one manages to steal his invention then probably on day this man will die with his great secret. If I had an oil company and a bunch of money like Oil Companies have? Surely I would like to see him in the coffin and I would do a alot to help it. So the solution is one: Open Source the whole think and Rossi will just be the man who saved humanity. But he thinks that he will become rich. That's why I think that he is going to take his secret with him in the grave.
Damn, cold fusion and reversal of the elephant population decline solved in the same week. The world really is an amazing place!!
(I need a :rolleyes: emoticon)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Right and how do you keep it secret?
You keep the important parts a secret initially by sharing it with someone with enough money to fund you and a profit motive. If I really have a game-changing technology, it's NOT hard to attract investors who will have the money and flesh eating lawyers you need to defend that idea. Yes they are going to want equity but if it really is what he claims then there would be more than enough money to go around to make everyone involved happy. No (sane) investor is going to back you without a full disclosure of how the device works. If (miraculously) this thing did work, it would be very easy to protect until you got to market.
You also at some point do NOT keep it a secret. You get it patented. A patent is far better protection than a secret. Secrets do not remain secrets. Patents are based on first to file so if the inventor doesn't patent this then someone else will. The fact that nothing here has been patented should be a huge blinking neon sign clue that there is nothing here to protect.
Look at the number of cheap iPhone knockoffs that appeared a year after the iPhone came out. He doesn't have apple's lawyers to defend him.
Almost every product has knockoffs. If you are afraid to go to market because of this possibility then you will never go to market. There is no way to go to market without taking some amount of risk from potential competitors.
All of this is ultimately academic however because there is almost certainly no actual invention here to protect. This has all the trappings of a classic fraud.
Read the report (specifically page 8 and annex 2) - they actually analyzed the device's coating material.
Reading the "report" would be a waste of my time. I don't really care what they analyzed or didn't. I don't care if these "researchers" are credible or not. If this is real and they want to prove it is real there is a well established scientific protocol for doing that. This isn't that protocol. Until that protocol is followed my default position is that this is a fraud.
you basically need Rossi/Industrial Heat (the company that acquired Rossi's device and tech) to provide you with his black box and stay the hell away from the test
We do not need the "black box". Anyone doing a credible analysis need full disclosure to genuinely independent investigators of how the device supposedly works. Science and engineering do not work on black boxes.
This test didn't occur in his lab, but in a neutral lab with controlled access. He was however present for the loading of the initial "fuel"
Then it wasn't a "neutral" lab. Automatic fail right there.
As for the researchers themselves, they are far from disreputable,
Their reputation or lack thereof is irrelevant. People with good reputations can be fooled. People with good reputations can be frauds. Either the facts are fully disclosed and check out or they do not. There is a well established scientific protocol for examining claims like this and it wasn't followed here.
This does warrant further research
No it does not. If this Rossi fellow really wants to prove that it works then there are certain steps he can take to make that happen. Until he does that then it should be assumed to be a fraud and not worth anyone's time to investigate further.
It should be noted that he was watched at all time by several people though
Which is 100% irrelevant. Go watch a magician sometime. You can watch them as closely as you want and they can still fool you. Heck, Penn & Teller have an entire TV show where they challenge other magicians to fool them and some actually do.
He's previously claimed a device to produce oil from waste. Which was shown to be a scam, and he was sent to prison for.
He's previously claimed a device to produce electricity from waste, when finally independently tested they produced less than 1w when he claimed 800w.
He's now claiming a device that can perform cold fusion? Not exactly the best track record here...
Reference for the above - his wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_(entrepreneur)
Working group will answer questions!
The authors of the long term test-report of the hot-cat had offered us the possibility to ask them a bunch of questions. Our idea is that YOU can post your question to the authors. Check this link.
http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/722-Ask-questions-to-the-Working-Group-ECAT-long-term-test/?pageNo=1
The only way I measured temperature that way , was to have a spectrocope measure the width of a H transition peak in a plasma , and calculate the exp from the alpha constant back to the temperature from the form of the gaussian, and even that was not very precise. On the other hand direct luminescence IR camera measurement were all over the place.
So Mr. Anonymous doesn't like the fact that I started with the earliest example of scientific misconduct of the authorities.
You showed no example of scientific misconduct what so ever.
In science you adapt your protocol, and you eliminate problem when you are told your protocol are not good enough. So when pointed out that IR camera was not a good way, when pointed out that THEY as having a relationship with Rossi were not truly independent, and that rossi loading / unloading the fuel was a possible cause of cheating, what did they do ? Did they adapt protocol ? Nope. More of the same.
So when you ignore scientist objection and try to ram your "this is not science because YOU the critic have no numbers" look into a mirror. What levi did is not science, he repeated the same systematic error in the first experiment.
The fact remain rossi is a *known* scammer, has been condemned by justice previously, pretend he has a source of energy, has been caught near the "rheostat" during previous experiments, was caught with isotopic natural "ashes" at the initial experiments, etc...etc... So sorry if we point out the obvious, Andrea "you are all snake clown" Rossi and levi are not doing science. I am starting to think Levi is either getting Senile , or is "on" the take.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What I would like to see is the power bill for the facility the test was conducted in compared to earlier months. 1.5MWh be pretty easy to spot.
James Randy has shown how easy it is to dupe Scientists. I want people who know how people who are trained in deciption test this thing. Pen and Teller would do. Bet they would call bullshit.
This device could prevent World War III if that dam war hadn't already been prophecied in the book of Revelations.
I wonder if they could just look at their power bill, see if they used about 1.5 Megawatts extra power that month. Come to think of it where was this test carried out, a school, college, business or home? ~46 Kilowatts per day is a very noticeable amount of power unless your in an apartment/business complex with a single meter.
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% making sure your subordinates assign all patents over to you.
-- Thomas Edison, I think
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If he really has a device that works as advertized, he doesn't need investors. He needs a really big laser to hook it up to and suitable ninja-proof volcano to house it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It seems that some people don't know that when a new phenomenon is observed you don't understand all, neither the theory, nor all the detailed conditions...
You can start with semiconductors or the fire.
What is fascinating is that this evident problem does not appear evident ?
Why is theory so important ? does people don't knows what is to work on a new thing you don't understand well, but which is real?
If something have a theory and work reliably as predicted, where is the science... call an operator. not even an engineer.
F&P did not understand what they have... that is normal. It is McKubre who understood that loading was one of the key. Soon experimenter have understood that the metallurgy of the palladium was another key. the temperature, the contamination by 1H, by fingers, by impurities from the water or the vessels, were others keys...
I had no problem in 1992 to understand that, since I was trained to semiconductors... good school of modesty indeed.
Another problem is that F&P were too good in calorimetry, too experience. as Charles Beaudette in excess Heat explain, as Georges Longchampt in his 1996 replication have demonstrate, as Melvin Miles at ICCF17 have showed in his calorimetry comparison, the F&P calorimeter was full of tricks that were flying miles above the head of beginners like Lewis or Hansen, and even of most electro-chemist who preferred simpler (but more expensive and slower) calorimetry (closed cells isothermal flow, Seebeck, gas separation)...
for me as I've gathered historical data from excess Heat (Beaudette), Fire From Ice (Mallove), little from The Science of LENr (Storms), it started by a total fierce mess during 2 month.
some physicist were upset like Huizenga (a Pomp clone) by the breaking of their ultra-simplified perception of physics (his vision 2body for a material science physicist is laughable)... these guys were like pomp the kind to say that things don't exist and are error if they don't have a theory... very common today.
but there was also enthusiastic physicist who under the fire of their local Pomp, took the risk, imagining it was simple...
it was not simple, it was chemistry. it took 1 year minimum for chemist, 2 years for chemistry trained physicist. one experiment required 3 month typically...
The problem is that there was bad experiments that did not even failed (MIT for example succeed bu theory tweaked the result helped by bad calorimetry, same without tweaking for Caltech and Harwell)... worst than that there was false positive. and beside that F&P did similar student errors in particle detection, out of their domain of competence...
And beside there was the physicist who decided that heat was not important, because they were not competent in it, and who imagined that it was necessarily hot fusion, and when observing that there was no neutron (yes less than 1/billion what expected, none beside parasites), concluded heat was an error... there was still no bulletproof tritium, incoherent heat result...
In 2 month the enthusiastic who suffered under the fire of the conservators abandoned with pain in their back from all the back-stab...
Erab panel did it's planned job to cut the funding. nature, NyT and Science led the terror against dissenters ensuring no scientist with a career pursued that way... end of the story.
After 1-2 years there was good results of calorimetry, many replication of tritium finding, but clearly no similarities with hot fusion...
it was too late. would the race not have started, and the conference of 1989 be started in 1991, all physicist would have agreed cold fusion was real and interesting... Now there are hundred of peer reviewed article about heat, sometime hundred of watt, tritium, dozen of He4/Heat studies that show a coherent picture, transmutations,
the rest is pure underground science, with military labs, NASA GRC drawers, Asian labs, corporate or startup labs...
for the academic who insulted F&P and all replicators it was impossible to admi
euh what you say is not logic.
if you show heat above anything chemical. it is proven.
even if you find no nuclear ashes.
note also that there is ashes found, He4 is correlated with heat.
tritium is observed many times with high precision , and sometime much above background.
anyway I understand you reasoning as it is the Pomp reasoning, the Huizenga reasoning :
- something with out a theory don't exist.
Huizenga wrote that:
"Furthermore, if the claimed excess heat exceeds that possible by other conventional processes (chemical, mechanical, etc.), one must conclude that an error has been made in measuring the excess heat."
the end of science... today's consensus.
There is many reference to misconduct. One it MIT tweaking of result that their editor (Mallove) have spotted. http://www.infinite-energy.com... http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw... One is Science not correcting errors in caltech paper http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/R... there is also the Oriani paper rejection for no serious reason (theory) there is also the rejection upfront of Report41 of Enea (Denino) showing He4/Heat corelation http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ra... (as 40+ other journals) There is a report by Pamela Mosier Boss, ex SU Navy Spawar, prolific author in Naturwissenshaften and Journal of Electroanalythical Chemistry who complained about emotional behavior in high impact journals http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCM... (page6+ in that proceeding). there are many more to list from the old ape of cold fusion... depending if you search academic misconduct, journal misconduct, insults, horse manure in the mailbox, nasty jokes ruining experiments, sabotaging grants by donators, demoting a researcher to the stock, ... some consider it is normal academic behavior, and it is in a way true, so maybe it is normal.
Currently there are many report of similar problem, some by few Nobel like Sheckman or Sidney Brenner, who can afford to moan without being blacklisted.
Maybe we cannot change that, not really say it is monstrous, but we should be aware that things works that nasty way, and not be too naive.
Sorry for previous coward postings , forgot to logon...
" If the inventor really has figured something out, and I'll grant you that's unlikely, it would behoove him to keep a tight lid on it until he has pretty much the entire eastern seaboards worth of lawyers under his belt"
He pretend to have something and has been very public about it for years while stopping anybody to check for a hoax. The "independent" experiment as this one need size 7 scary quote. So on one hand he is not protecting his invention by doing a NORMAL patent (disclosing thus how to reproduce an ecat 100%) and he tried to make a useless patent same as other scammer do and withholding info(which you are not allowed to do to be protected). On the other hand he keep telling critics are snake clown and having no real independent experiment (all 4 authors are in relationship with rossi, and rossi keep a tight rein on controls).
On the scam side Steorn was more funny.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It looks like he measured the power consumption of 1 phase of the 3 phase heating resistors. This would give the input heat value a factor of 1/3 of what it actually is. For example looking at the chart item #1 Consumption Watts = 815.86, x3 = 2447.58 subtract the "convection wattage" of 387.34 = 2060.24 which is 97% of the shown "Total Wattage" of 2128.32. This calculation was done on the assumption that the resistive heating coils were identically matched elements.
Somethings not analyzed in the report are the characteristics of each of the heater coils in regards to their matching to each other and their thermal characteristics. Many resistive devices have a negative temperature coefficient and their resistance lowers when heated and draws more power. The dummy load was only brought up to 500W for comparison which seems suspect.
if you hang around with the sloppy, the untrainable, the secretive whose work can't be duplicated, it starts to look like normality.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Maybe its real maybe it's not, but you can be so over protective that it never comes to light
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite
The stuff is under patent and NDAs exist if patents wouldn't last long enough,so there's absolutely no reason to make the device a black box that can't be examined internally to see what it's doing.
And this is talking as an engineering project, not science.
As a scientific proposal, it must be opened up so people can see what may be going on, device theories explaining it, extrapolate the consequence if that theory is correct, then test for that consequence to prove or disprove the theory.
Without either of those, it is a scam.
Remember back when slashdot ran a story on Cool Chips, the alleged world changing electron tunneling Seebeck heat to electricity converters with an 80% efficiency? Slashdot is always running scam funding stories. I am always surprised the major corporations like Boeing that get their good name roped into these scams. How did they not get sued by Boeing?
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...
The are part of the scammy Borealis Group which appears to still live and sell stock to keep the doors open, wish I could print money like that. Their wikipedia entry is hilarious! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Good evidence would be the production of gamma rays at specific energies in the Ni58(p,gamma)Cu59 nuclear reaction. None has been presented.
There is no evidence that a "secret sauce" chemical reaction can overcome the p + Ni58 Coloumb barrier. Protons accelerated on the order of MeV are required to do so.
Interstitial hydrogen in copper, and in other metals such as palladium, has been studied for decades with no evidence of a nuclear fusion reaction.
It's a scam or a delusion as best.
Also, as pointed out by the article, if his Ecat worked as he claims, everyone would be dead within 10 minutes of starting the reactor, due to massive Gamma radiation leaks.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows Gamma radiation just gives people super powers. Rossi himself is the perfect example. He's been working with this device for so long, he has the superhuman ability to transform bullshit into attention.
Now that he's had a team of researchers spending a month examining this thing in a sorta-sciencey way, we should watch them for signs of super powers. I suspect they've gained the ability to smash their own credibility in one swift stroke.
Redundancy is good And also good.
The Physics of why the e-Cat’s Cold Fusion Claims Collapse:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
Stop the quasi hysteria. Find out why and how it is happening instead of trying to figure out why it shouldn't happen, which is completely unscientific
So just who are these t "six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden" ??
They seem to have left this out. More BS.
I remain a skeptic, but am intrigued. My chemistry and nuke understanding is limited enough so reading the paper it seemed to make sense, but outside my field. Still, I hope they are right and can get something usable to market SOON, without the big oil (I used to work in the oil patch) trying to bury it. That is if it is financially viable.
A mystery that "science" is thus far incapable of grasping, and reluctant to properly investigate. It's been YEARS now and this has been outright dismissed by "science".
"Establishment gonna fall down and go boom."
Dr Ruth Leavitt - The Andromeda Strain (1971)
if you show heat above anything chemical. it is proven.
even if you find no nuclear ashes.
No it's not. That pretty much disproves it.
In science, you replicate the experiment to prove it's not a glitch, randomness, a trick or a systemic measurement error. Looking sideways at a blackbox with poor measurement tools under the supervision of a known con-man is nowhere near replicating the experiment in a separate setting.
What possible motivation would he have for perpetrating a hoax by switching shit out? Eventually, his bullshit will be discovered and his ass is done in physics, and he'd be sued into oblivion by any investors.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That cracked me up.....
The person who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt the person doing it.
With 32 "customers" at 4303.77 EUR per head, that's quite a nice amount of Eurobucks for these guys...
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Italy - Let's see, that's the country where geoscientists were convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/23/...
I'm not sure how anyone can maintain a rigorous scientific practice, under a system such as that.
We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone. -management
Yet more gibberish...it's right up there with the abject nonsense from Steorn.
Sounds like it is full of bologna.
because information != bandwidth
It's kinda a stupid question.
Given a choice between making $400k a year (minus operating and maintenance expenses, which we have no idea of) and potentially making billions off an invention, which would you choose?
There is no invention and thus there is no choice. This is no different however than the scam artists who sell courses on how to get rich selling houses or investing in the stock market rather than actually doing it themselves. They know there is no money in actually doing what they are selling but there is money in convincing gullible people to give them money.
I'm just saying that there is no reason to think he's a hoax just based on his business strategy.
Yes there is. I've worked in and with private equity. I've done fund raising for real companies. I know how real companies do this and you can be sure that this is NOT how honest people sell an invention. This is how a scam artist works. If this were real he would be able to march into any private equity firm on the planet and they would absolutely throw money at him after some due diligence.
They DID throw money at him. Tom Darden set up a company for him after doing said sue diligence, millions of dollars to buy his IP. Also Tom has gone on record saying that the ECAT used in this new test was made by the Industrial Heat team, NOT ROSSI. Meaning that you might as well call Tom Darden and the team over at Industrial Heat fraudsters too.
concludes that the E-cat is "a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible. Nevertheless we have to relate to the fact that the experimental results from our test show heat production beyond chemical burning, and that the E-Cat fuel undergoes nuclear transformations.
Gee, could it be a standard exothermic chemical reaction?
Of course it is. Move along, no scientific discovery to look at here. When you get a fusion reaction, there's a Hellovalota energy given off. Not impressed.
Not if you think about it. But then your AC, so i guess thinking is something you don't do a lot of.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Yet ANOTHER Slashdot article about some wishy-washy content that is full of speculation.
Yes, this article was read and commented on by many.... but IMHO at the expense of actual quality content on this site.
This is happening too often lately. Come on Slashdot, show some concern about the quality of content on your site before people stop taking you seriously.
Just look up Rossi's bio. He went to prison in the late 70's for causing 40 million euros worth of environmental damage from his supposed company that was claiming to convert waste materials into oil. Then he started yet another scam company related to power conversion that failed to work as promised.
This is just his latest scam based on a "too good to be true" idea that dreamers and fools will latch onto.
Other people reported heat being generated. That doesn't mean it's cold fusion. There isn't necessarily an obvious difference between a chemical reaction and a very inefficient nuclear one, and nobody (as far as I know) ever ruled out chemical reactions.
It could be demonstrated to be fusion by either producing enough heat that it couldn't possibly be a chemical reaction (which didn't happen), or observing neutrons (which were not being generated).
Once we realize that, we realize that Oriani was claiming to violate a whole lot of physical theory with scanty evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Oriani apparently didn't provide that. Nature could indeed publish a "cold fusion" paper if somebody definitely had cold fusion going and had good evidence for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are lots of peer reviewed papers reporting excess heat well in excess of chemical levels -- papers that have not been even so much as criticized by the true believers in current interpretation of physical theory. See http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/S...
You can't have it both ways. You either can have scientific method where experiment is permitted to be published that falsifies currently fashionable interpretation of physical theory, or you can have theocracy. Its that simple. Oriani's experimental evidence was sufficient for Nature's own peer reviewers. It was not a peer-review rejection. It was an editor veto of Nature's own peer reviewers. This is scientific misconduct, pure and simple.
Nature then proceeded to block additional empirical-only papers from Oriani on the grounds that he offered no theory to explain the results -- results that falsified currently fashionable interpretation of physical theory. Science starts with observation and theory ends with observation that fasifies theory. Nature is engaging in gross scientific misconduct and it is a pattern of behavior.
Seastead this.
"Unless that happens it's a hoax."
Huh? First of all, that is a complete non-sequitur. You might right "until that happens," the cause of the origin is unknown, but that doesn't make it a hoax. Really now. A little more skepticism would be in order. Second, if you do a little research you will know that experiments similar to this, although usually on a much smaller scale, have been generating reproducible results for twenty years now. Theoretical posturing will help with cognitive dissonance, but not with actually learning about what is happening in the real world.
There seems to be almost panic from those who criticize Rossi and his e-cat. Could it be that they are employed by or paid by companies in or tied to energy related business? I am convinced that they have much to loose should Rossi prevail and take significant share from the existing producers of energy. The team that tested the e-cat are serious men of science, with impressive credentials who have much to loose if they are wrong. It's highly unlikely that they are far off in their evaluation.
Isn't it strange that someone like Krivit would have us believe he is qualified to challenge the scientists who did the tests on Rossi's e-cat?. I sense a huckster who has gone so far out on a limb in his criticism of Rossi, that he has to somehow convince someone- otherwise his reputation will crash an he will loose subscribers to this site. Obviously, Mr Krivit is in fear of Mr Rossi and his achievements.
There are lots of journals besides Nature, and lots of scientists who are not true believers. If P&F really had had cold fusion, they could easily have commercialized it by now, either as a genuine power source or as a scientific toy. I find it exceedingly unlikely that a real breakthrough like this would not have had repercussions by now.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
F&P clearly did not have an adequate theory and even they admitted as much. Even with an adequate theory, development is orders of magnitude more expensive than research. WIthout an adequate theory, you have to have an industrial laboratory the size of GE running in an Edisonian mode of scattershot trial and error.
Seastead this.
Yep, I'd love to see a dozen more labs replicate this finding.
Now, you are demanding that investigators look for a picogram-level mass delta. But really, how much proof would that add; isn't it much easier to fake a tiny mass delta than to fake an overwhelming shift from Nickel-58/Nickel-60 to Nickel-62?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Why not just load the whole thing into a bomb calorimeter? That's the immediately obvious way to measure what they want to measure.
Indeed, that's how BlackLight Power is proving its unconventional energy source.
"Here's why, most likely, they always will."
This is an example of Slashdot link text that disappoints. I was expecting some reason or principle why cold fusion will be impossible. You gave us nothing. NOTHING!
reputeable, but unnamed and anonymous
Never heard of any of those. Fellow fraudsters with a sheepskin are impressive. Rossi has a track recond of taking money and failing to deliver.
The paper has an alarming lack of information that precludes it from being a scientific paper.
All 6 of these professors are now 100% cranks and will be shunned and rightly so.
That's exactly what the LENR boys have been doing, for more than a year now. Well, except that they say the energy is not drawn from nothing, it's from weak nuclear force reactions (conventional fission and fusion are driven by the strong nuclear force). NASA has a reactor, and MIT has one; and there are several more in Italy and Japan.
But... nobody will talk to them. Because King Oil is first and foremost the ruler of our minds. And if you refuse to look or listen, you can still claim it's all a hoax!
And of course here on /., where a solid third (at least) of the commenters on energy issues are paid shills, there is a similar fetish for fission and hot fusion, as well.
Now that viable theories exist to explain the empirically demonstrable behavior of weak nuclear force reactions, there's only one reason for this technology to remain controversial: because people do not, and will not, believe their own eyes or brains. As Stanley Milgram and David R. Stewart have shown us, people believe what they are told to believe. And we've been told not to believe in "cold fusion", so it doesn't matter that it unequivocally can be done.