On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, John Berry wrote: > but he did inform me of someone else (In Italy IIRC, which I very well may > not) who had replicated the effect and that is the same basic device here.
That's different! (And by replication, do you mean the stand-alone operation, with no DC supply, no sig gen, no nothing except a ground connection and some glowing LEDs?) I hadn't heard that anyone had made it work without being driven by a signal generator (and with unknown power input from the sig gen.) > Sometimes it pays not to squeeze everything to death especially when you > don't know how it works Well, it depends on how tolerant we are of massive disappointment. If Ron discovers that it's definitely being powered by the AM tower, and that there is no unexplained energy source... will he happily go on to the next experiment? Or will it be a crushing emotional blow? After watching (and occasionally experiencing) the failure of FE/OU experiments, I see that these failures can permanently put people off of experiments, if not ruin their lives or even push them off the deep end. For this reason, it's *essential* to start off by making damn sure that the discovery is real. Performing FE/OU experiments in the strong field of an AM radio station is a recipe for emotional disaster. It's the same as including batteries in your experiments rather than capacitors. It's the same as relying on high-freq input power measurements for detecting OU. To avoid such encounters with crushed hopes, we just need to be extremely paranoid that the odd effect could very well turn out to be something conventional. And then test the hell out it before daring to admit that something unexplained is occurring. (Or set up the situation so there are no conventional energy sources present at all.) > and instead go with the weight of evidence and > probabilities which in this case is for something decidedly unusual > occurring. (I'm not saying that it shouldn't be scrutinized, just that it > should be in balance with how little is known of this mysterious energy) It's either the nobel prize, **OR** it's just tapping into the AM radio station. Talking about a mysterious energy as if it's been detected ...is falling into the trap of belief-before-verification. As long as the possibility of AM-tower energy reception is enormous, the possibility of enormous crushing disappointment hovers over everyone who has decided that the effect is a real anomaly. But I say again, for those who can repeatedly tolerate these kinds of disappointments, then by all means don't bother protecting yourself from them. Those among us with wide open sensitivity should be wary, and should not risk leaping to a stance of belief before the major pathways to disappointment have been blocked. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 425-222-5066 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
