At 04:07 PM 2/25/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
The assertion that "a determined con artist"
can do this or that strikes me as inadequate.
A con artist is not a magician capable of
changing the laws of physics or magically influencing instruments.
Uh, Jed, a con artist is indeed a magician,
that is, someone skilled at the art of producing illusion.
I meant a real magician, with supernatural powers. A mythical person.
Okay. But my point remains.
A stage magician is indeed skilled in the art of
producing illusions, but these are optical
illusions or sleight of hand tricks. They fool
people. They cannot fool instruments. There are
no examples of such a thing happening in the
history of science, as far as I know. If you or
anyone else knows of an example, let's hear it.
Otherwise, please stop saying it can happen.
There have been dramatic demonstrations, I've
read about them, but I don't care to look them
up. I'm simply going to assert that, given enough
motivation, I could fake a demonstration like
that reported. I'd have to have the motivation,
and I certainly don't. I'm not interested in fake anything.
If you think it could not be done, you are
suffering from a poverty of imagination.
Would it be easy? Not particularly. I'd want to
control certain things, but they would not necessarily be obvious.
Unlikely? Perhaps! But, Jed, there are plenty of
reasons to be suspicious here, just general
reasons. That there is this or that appearance doesn't prove things either way.
There are examples of con-men -- not stage
magicians -- who substituted fake instruments
for real ones. There are also many, many badly
designed experiments that were either scams, or
tantamount to a scam. I have seen some. They did
not fool me for a moment. I am nowhere near as
knowledgeable as Focardi, Levi or Gallantini.
The notion that you could set up such a simple,
fool-proof first-principle experiment with them
and have it turn out to be faked strikes me as
so improbable it is not worth worrying about.
I disagree, but do not know if we will have proof
on this being such a case. If he comes up with
the 1 MW demo, or even something lesser than
that, which can be *independently verified*,
great! That would prove that this was not a fake.
Sometimes, however, a person believes that they
are *just about to make it work,* and they need
to generate support. So they fake it till they
make it. That's the kind of thing I've heard about before.
That's also happened with faked research results.
The person believed that their results were real,
but, damn it! something happened! Here, we can
make this look better by a leetle data
seelection. Nobody will notice, since, after all,
my theory is correct. By waiting, I will be
depriving the world of the benefits of this
fabulous theory or process. Besides, I'm running out of money....
Probably, if Rossi disappears, we will have
strong reason to think it was fake. Or is that
just what the Repressive Power Cabal would want
us to think? The arguments could go on for years....
Here is an example of an experiment that could
be faked. Dennis Cravens proposed to use Pd-D
powder to produce heat inside a thermoelectric
device that would light an LED. Now Cravens is
as honest as the day is long, and I would not
accuse him of faking anything. But I told him
that in my opinion this experiment would not be
convincing because it would be easy to hide a
tiny battery and thin wires in such a device, to
keep the LED glowing for weeks. The set up would
seem suspicious to intelligent people with a
suspicious turn of mind. People such as Levi,
who described "prudential" checks for hidden wires and the like.
You are correct, and that is one reason why I
don't place much credence in demonstrations.
Arata ran a stirling engine. So what? You could
run a stirling engine with the heat of formation
of palladium deuteride. What if the deuterium
simply has some delayed deuteride formation effect?
I'm impressed more by calorimetry from techniques
that are independently verified. Even if it's more "complicated."
When we know how to make stuff that can be scaled
up, great. It has to be reliable, remember. Not
some nice heat most of the time, then the damn thing melts down!
The point is, you can easily hide a thin wire to
light an LED, but you cannot hide a wire that carries 130 kW.
Jed, you are setting too high a bar, making
assumptions. Energy can be stored, for release upon a trigger.
I'm telling you, the demo could be faked. Without
collusion. With collusion, it gets much easier.
Collusion can happen. It's possible.
We are not talking the ordinary process of
science here. We are talking about a staged
demonstration under the control of an
inventor/promoter/entrepreneur. There are reasons
to be cautious. Very good reasons.
Let's look at this in a year, okay?
The nature of the Rossi test makes it
impossible to fake. At least, that will be my
opinion until someone suggests a plausible
method of faking it. Just saying "it might be
fake" does not make the case. Saying that stage
magicians can fool watt meters makes no case at
all. They can't. You can dismiss that idea. The
kind of thing they do -- causing lions to
seemingly vanish -- is not like fooling a watt
meter or heating tap water to 40°C as measured
by a thermocouple. Kidwell cited a display in
Disneyland once of a hot tap and cold tap water
that produced an sensory illusion that a third
tap was at a different temperature than it
really was. That would not fool a thermocouple.
You are making hosts of assumptions, Jed. Sure,
you can't fool a thermocouple, but there are many
ways to fool those who read thermocouples.
Hollywood special effects people could easily
make a fake experiment produce hot water out of
nowhere. But when you see their work up close,
on the stage set, without camera angles or video
special effects, the illusion vanishes. Their
methods are blatantly obvious. Suppose you
visited the stage set of "2001 Space Odyssey."
You would not be fooled into thinking this is a real space ship:
I am not rushing. I have been hearing about
Rossi on and off for a year. Focardi and others
I trust have been working with him for 2 years
or more. I am all but convinced his claims are
real. I have no serious doubts left, after the
18-hour test. If he were the first person in
history to report Ni-H, I would have lots of doubts!
Sure. I understand. That's a reason to give the
*possibility* much more credence.
Every individual experiment might have been
deception. It's the combination, the multiple
independent confirmations, that rule this out routinely.
It is also the nature of the experiment. Some
experiments are much easier to fake than others.
Some, such as the first nuclear bomb explosion
are absolutely impossible to fake. That was
definitely not a chemical explosion, or an
optical illusion. Rossi's tests are on the nuclear bomb end of the scale.
Not quite! Jed, you are using hyperbole. If the
demonstration had produced a fireball, killing
everyone, vaporizing the place, but we had a
remote video feed -- or maybe even if we didn't
-- we'd be on the "nuclear bomb end of the scale." Just to be clear.
Curiously, many experiments that today are
considered conclusive were actually on the
inconclusive or it-might-be-fake end of the scale. See the book "The Golem."
(Hmmm . . . It would not have been difficult to
fake the first nuclear reactor, Pile 1 at U.
Chicago. Most cold fusion experiments could be
faked by me with no difficulty. I guess you
could fake Pam Boss's neutron results with a neutron source.)
It could surely be done. Highly unlikely, but
surely possible. I don't consider her neutron
results to be confirmed, yet. Plausible,
surprising, even, but not confirmed, because the
only follow-up papers have been from her. Very believable.
But prudence is prudence.
This is being demonstrated outside of normal
scientific protocols. There is a reason for
those protocols. I'm also aware that Rossi has
his reasons, which may be legitmate, to keep
this secret. But the consequence of the secrecy
is increased skepticism and suspicion. That's simply natural.
It is natural. Also, his reasons are definitely
legitimate. He has no patent. He stands to lose
a secret worth hundreds of billions of dollars
if the nature his material is revealed. It is hard to think of a better reason!
I've acknowledged that. On the other hand, he
stands to lose it anyway! Because of the defects
in the patent filing. This is not, probably, a
process secret, something that could not be
discovered by analyzing the product. As soon as
he sells a few of these things, the cat is out of
the bag. If he hasn't disclosed the secret, and
if the devices work, they will be taken apart and
studied in intimate detail. And no contractual agreement would prevent that.
Aw, gee, Rossi, someone broke in and stole the
thing! Sorry, can you send us another one, we'll pay for the loss, of course.
He may have some illegitimate reasons as well. None that I am aware of.
Why wait a year when we can argue about this endlessly today?
