Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> That's correct. It would take a magician familiar with physics, perhaps. > Certainly that would be the case here. Ordinarily, magicians can fool > physicists about as well as they can fool anyone else. No doubt they can, but they cannot fool thermocouples or computers. Once the experiment is set up by the professor, optical illusions and the like can no longer disguise the course of events. I, on the other hand, can fool a computer. (Somewhat. Given enough time . . . Okay, I would know where to start.) If you are saying Rossi might be a master hacker and instrument wizard, you have a point. Yes, there are various lines of attack, if you have the resources of the FBI at your disposal, with technical experts in many fields. There are three stages open to attack: Before the experiment. A stage magician could not persuade the professor do the experiment the wrong way. Perhaps someone highly skilled in hypnosis could do this, with a post-hypnotic suggestion, i.e. "after you awake you will forget everything that happened today, but when it comes time to do the Rossi experiment, you will use this thermocouple instead of the one in the cabinet . . ." During. The instruments are in control, and impervious to illusions. After. A stage magician could not convince the professors to change their judgement or evaluation of the results. He cannot shake their professional competence in their own field. This mental ability that cannot be bamboozled by the techniques used to make tigers disappear from the stage. As I said, you can use rapid double talk or sleight of hand to do a card trick or to pick my pocket. You can easily fool me with the disappearing tiger act. But no matter how fast you talk or how dazzling your moves may be, you could never fool me into thinking you are speaking Japanese, when you are actually speaking gibberish. The sound effects guy on Prairie Home Companion does wonderful imitation French, Swedish and Japanese. It sounds like Japanese, and he mixes in some real Japanese words. It might fool someone who does not speak the language but it would never fool me, no matter how well he does it. You could never confuse a professor about physics or make him believe that 1 calorie does not equal 4.2 joules. > But in this case, the fooling would be about creating an impression for a > physicist, so, yes, knowledge of physics would be necessary. A physicist does not draw conclusions from an "impression." He draws it from numbers recorded by instruments. You have to change the numbers, by hacking the computer, or pen recorder, or thermocouple. Yes, you would have to know as much about the experiment as the professor, and probably a lot more about the instruments. As I said, I do not think a stage magician has any relevant skills. An engineer or programmer would. Anyway, I think it is unlikely that Rossi has such skills or that he can pay others to execute nefarious hacking and the like. So unlikely, I discount that possibility. By the way, this is why it is absurd that Nature magazine sent "The Amazing Randi" to disprove homeopathy. He has zero qualifications. I once communicated with him for a couple of weeks regarding cold fusion. As I recall he and his supporters claimed he could "find the trick" and disprove it. I sent him some papers by McKubre (or maybe Miles?) and said something like: "Do your worst. Where are the tricks? Show me the errors. What doesn't add up?" It was apparent that he had no idea what the papers were about. Show him into a lab and he would not know which end of the calorimeter is up. You can't play a trick when you have no idea what the wires are or what the numbers on the screen represent. A mass media blowhard skeptic assured me he could "find the trick." I pointed him to the "60 Minutes" program and asked him what he thought Violante was doing (running a cathode through a cold roller), and what the various components on McKubre's calorimeter are. He had no clue. - Jed
