Jed Rothwell 5:36 PM (5 hours ago)
Nope. The legal system does not sue scientists for publishing fraudulent or idiotic reports. ***The legal system brings its resources to bear upon scientists who scam others with fraudulent reports. One reason is that no one can tell fools and frauds apart. When I first saw Penon's data I though Penon and Rossi were fools, and I could see they were copying data from one day to the next, which is borderline fraud, but I never imagined they were engaged in wholesale fraud. The full report plus the report from Murray are proof of that. ***You keep saying proof and you keep using the legal term 'fraud'. If you had proof of your neighbor committing armed robbery, the police would round him up. What you have is evidence that didn't even stand up in a civil court. It is far from proof and in fact it is proof that Rossi could not be convicted of the crime. So it's just you huffing and puffing at this point. If the legal system were to arrest scientists for stupid mistakes and bad reports, most scientists would be in jail. As Bohr said, an expert is someone who has made every possible mistake. ***They only go after those who use those stupid mistakes and deliberately bad reports to scam investors. That's what fraud is. Not what you keep saying it is. The police also do not investigate people who pretend to have heat exchangers and who do bad calorimetry. ***They would if it were proof of fraud. There are dozens of dishonest people selling fake over-unit engines (perpetual motion machines). Even when they take large sums of money from the public, the police do not bother them, as far as I know. Perhaps they should, but they don't. ***As far as I know there have been some charlatan pseudoscientists put in jail for defrauding the public. Kevmo: All the other stuff would be icing on the cake. But Rossi is not up on charges. The standard of proof for civil cases (fraud in this case) is "preponderance of evidence" and IH couldn't make the case. Jed: I don't know if they could or not. ***They settled! That means they couldn't make the case! The main point I want to make is that regardless of what the legal system rules are, or preponderance of this or that, anyone with technical knowledge can see from the Penon report that Rossi is a fraud. ***If that is such a strong case then IH would have had a slam dunk and also the authorities would be rounding up Rossi as a fraud. If you can't see that, you don't have technical knowledge. Or you blinded by wishful thinking. Insofar as this is a technical debate based on scientific & engineering laws, divorced from the legal system and its standard of proof, there is no doubt Rossi is a liar and a fake. ***That's the problem with science. Like when Al Gore said "there was no controlling legal authority", in science there is no controlling authority when someone is a liar and a fake. For instance, when MIT fraudulently changed their data to show a null result rather than a positive Anomalous Heating Event. There's no one to say: "Those guys are frikken liars and we're putting them in jail". But such is not the case with the legal community, and people are regularly put in jail for defrauding investors. So if I were you I'd start choosing a different term than fraud to describe Rossi, maybe something like scientific charlatan, which is the same term I would use for those MIT jerks. .
