On 01/17/2011 01:36 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: > >> It's not impossible to draw that from a simple wall plug, but it >> takes some preparation. While I doubt that's how it was done, unless >> someone inspected the plug and the cord, it can't be ruled out as >> being "impossible", particularly if the 12 kW can be shaded a bit. > > Shading "a bit" would not work. You have to shade it by a factor of > 10. Frankly, that's impossible.
You can draw around 30 amps from house wiring (maybe not very safely, but you can do it). That's a lot closer to 50 amps than a factor of 10. (And it sure doesn't require superconducting cables to do it.) In these days of circuit breakers people don't do that so much; in the old days, when you could upgrade your wires by screwing in a fuse with a bigger number, the experiment got tried a lot more frequently. The wires don't care whether it's 220 or 110; the voltage drop and concomitant heating depend only on the current. In any case, the fact that power-in was being measured (by someone other than Rossi) rules that scenario out -- but /a priori/ knowledge doesn't, and that was my point. > > >> If the person doing the demonstration is not honest, you cannot take >> /anything/ for granted. And that is why issues with Rossi's >> background are so important. > > If all of the people doing the demonstration are dishonest then you > cannot take anything for granted. If Rossi alone is a crook that would > make no difference. Untrue. It's /his/ black box in the middle. ... > As I said, when people who propose the hypothesis that this might be a > scam or a trick, I think it is incumbent upon them to explain how this > trick might work. Well, one proposal which seems to stand up is that the water didn't turn into steam, at all. Unless the steam was recondensed and the resulting water weighed, that can't be ruled out. Unless someone besides Rossi was privy to what was inside the "reactor", /you just don't know/ what happened to the water. Weighing the reactor before and after would have helped, too -- was that done? Peter's observation that it would have been both simpler and more convincing to just /heat/ a somewhat larger volume of water, rather than boiling it away entirely, was interesting. When something is done in a way that is more difficult, more complex, and less convincing, that's a yellow flag, all by itself. In any case, when you first heard of Copperfield's stunt with the Statue of Liberty, did you guess the trick? If you didn't, did that prove that he really had made it vanish? There were a /lot/ of witnesses to that one. > All hypothesis must be rigorously supported. This is a simple physics > experiment, albeit one with a black box in the middle. I'm sorry, it's not "simple" any more, with that black box in there.
