At 04:46 PM 4/26/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
There is another way to rule out fraud. You can allow experts examine the machine closely and look for the physical equipment needed to commit fraud, such as hidden wires and pipes. Rossi has done this. There is only a vanishingly small chance that a fraud might somehow be concealed in the 1 liter cell, and the experts will soon look inside of that, as well. Once they have done that, fraud will be eliminated as decisively as it would be if this were independently replicated 200 times.

Depends. Jed. Look, fraud is *extremely unlikely,* my opinion. However, if any group of people should be suspicious of "impossibility" proofs for "unknown mechanism," it should be those familiar with cold fusion.

Impossibility proofs are all suspect. And that includes a proof that "fraud by unknown mechanism" is impossible.

How many experts does it take, doing an examination like that? Suppose that it's possible to walk off with a few hundred million euros with a sophisticated fraud? Would it be impossible to buy an expert who looks the other way, he can later say, "Gee, I didn't think of *that* possibility!"

Don't mistake this for an accusation of anyone. Like I said, I think fraud is extremely unlikely.

There are possible mechanisms. Each one is highly unlikely, but highly unlikely does not mean "impossible." *How many mechanisms are possible?* There isn't any particular limit, Jed.

But once there is serious and multiply-independent examination, and especially full internal examination, it does become very, very ridiculously impossible. Quite simply, it's not there yet, it's not beyond the point of some very sophisticated fraud, unknown mechanism, with or without some kind of collusion from apparently independent experts.

But what is really ludicrous at this point is the skeptics -- say, on Wikipedia -- quite ready to confidently pronounced that this is, indeed, bogus, that they expect, any day now, to hear that Rossi isn't going to meet his deadline. That, in fact, is quite possible even if Rossi is fully and completely legitimate. What strikes me is the *belief* behond this.

They believe in their old, very tired, and clearly bogus impossibility proof, cold fusion is, for them, simply impossible, *therefore no matter what you say or do, they are certain it's error or fraud.* Doesn't matter what evidence exists. Now, will they be convinced by a commercial product? Probably eventually, but certainly not immediately. They will hold on to whatever shred of pseudo-skeptical reserve they can muster.

It's not about science at all. It's about *belief*. Almost the opposite of science.

There is no limit to human ingenuity but there are sharp limits to the laws of physics and methods of adding energy to this system. It is simple, and the performance of it has been well understood for nearly 200 years.

Jed, you are making exactly the error the skeptics made in 1989. You just contradicted yourself. There are, indeed, limits to the laws of physics, but suppose this:

Suppose Rossi has discovered a way to create a short term appearance of lots of heat, perhaps a really extreme chemical reaction, not previously known. Perhaps he figures out how to conceal fuel, but suppose this is basically useless for some reason, say, it's not practical, it's too expansive, etc. But could he do something with it? Sure. Use it for a demonstration, capture investment money, and then disappear. Perhaps a combination of methods are used, each one contributing energy. Several suggestions have been made that might manage part of it. What would someone do for a few hundred million euros?

You've stated "no limit," but then you supposed that you could understand the "sharp limits to the laws of physics," and this is exactly the argument that was made against cold fusion. It was a failure of the imagination, a belief that we already understood what was possible, and therefore what was not; the belief was that if there was a nuclear reaction in palladium deuteride, it must be d-d fusion, and since that reaction was believed *for very good reasons* to produce neutrons and tritium, copiously, yet they were not observed, or not observed at anything like the necessary levels to explain the heat, and since the rare helium branch *for very good reasons* must produce a gamma, they thought they had it nailed. Impossible. And if it's impossible, then the obvious conclusion: there *must* be some error, even if we don't know what it is.

Fraud cannot be accomplished except by some physical means, and all such means are easily defined and checked for with this system (although not with other systems).

There are many kinds of fraud, Jed, fraud can exist through very sophisticated ways of fooling observers, stuff that wouldn't be called "physical." Instruments can be substituted, and I've heard quite a number of such suggestions. Proposed as "it must be this," they are preposterous. But "impossible," no.

To truly understand that a thing is impossible, one must know what the thing would be!

You talk as if fraud is something magical that Rossi could accomplished by some means not known to science.

No, not "magical," but "unknown to science," maybe! Is it impossible that Rossi might figure out how to do something unknown to science?

Isn't that what he supposedly did, in fact?

(yes, we know that Ni-H has produced LENR effects, at least that seemed reasonably likely, I don't consider that it was as well established as Pd-D LENR, but still.... not "unknown," but nothing known had anything like the energy Rossi is showing. Just not quite so unexpected, for those who know LENR research.)

The whole point of fraud is that it is something an experienced scientist or engineer will spot instantly the moment he sees the physical mechanism (the wires or hidden fuel).

Sure. If he sees it, and if he hasn't been paid to not notice it. It is also not impossible that a fraud mechanism wouldn't be recognized, if it's completely unexpected.

There has been enough independent observation to make fraud quite unlikely, my opinion. But given how much is riding on this, "impossible" is too strong, and that's what I'm saying, Jed.

The fact is that the skeptics aren't going to be convinced until there is what Rossi is promising to deliver. They won't believe me and they won't believe you, even less. Within a year, if it goes well for Rossi, someone can make that tea-brewing samovar, it should not be a problem. Roght now, all we've got is constant comment, eh?

If Rossi can make this machine produce massive amounts of energy by some mechanism not known to science, that means it is not fraud -- by definition.

No, it could still be fraud. Jed, your imagination failure is showing. Suppose the "secret ingredient" turns out to involve so much energy in manufacture that it's energy-negative. Yes, that would be valuable, perhaps, as a new high-performance battery, but the ingredients could be prohibitively expensive. Or it's very dangerous. It would be clever to still make money with the thing by using it as a trick.

Or, if he has only managed to make the machine fool conventional flow calorimetry, that is almost as miraculous. No one can do that.

Aw, come on. You are correct, if those running the test are independent, and if they have full access to everything, and there are too many of them to corrupt. Look, when I can buy an E-Cat, and use it, the issue of fraud will be long gone.

If this whole thing mysteriously vanishes, Jed, *we will not know what that means.* That's, to me, why it's worrisome that it's being kept secret, and that is squarely the fault of the U.S. Patent Office, for not allowing patents on allegedly impossible devices. I've never figured out why they couldn't issue perpetual motion patents with a disclaimer. Hey, a device that *looks like perpetual* motion would be interesting, there might even be a market. Fun. Figure out the trick. Stodgy fools!

Levi, Essen et al. are convinced the machine is real because they understand that there are only a few limited ways to fake a reaction of this nature, and they are certain they have checked all such ways. I wasn't there, so that leaves me all-but-certain.

"All-but-certain" isn't unreasonable, and I have the sense that they are not totally certain either. Just well-convinced.

I can't imagine a professional scientist so stupid he does not take elementary precautions such as feeling the hose or checking the performance of the thermocouples. Levi he said he spent weeks calibrating. I have spent weeks calibrating various experiments myself, and I am certain I would have discovered every proposed fraud I have seen discussed, here and elsewhere. I would have discovered these things in the first 5 minutes.

Confident in yourself, Jed. Nice.

Despite assertions here about how easily a scientist or a thermocouple might be fooled by sleight-of-hand techniques,

Nobody said "easily." It would take high skill and hard work. Or maybe not. Maybe the con artist simply thought of something nobody else thought of. That's what magicians are good at doing. They don't violate the laws of physics, it just looks like they do.

no such techniques exist and there are no examples in the history of science when this was done. the examples that have been given were of tests or demonstrations actually performed by hand, not by machines.

Eh? A machine performed and evaluated the tests? Who set them up? And a machine would just do what it was programmed or designed to do. If it was designed to fool you, that's what it might succeed in doing. Or not. We are talking about *possibility* here, not likelihood.

What I see is that some highly respected and hard-headed researchers are now running full bore trying to figure out what Rossi has developed. They believe it enough to drop everything else. That means something to me, Jed.

If Abd thinks that fraud is a serious possibility,

No, you aren't reading me carefully. "Serious possibility" is not how I'd say it. "Not impossible" is what I'd say. And only for that very general reason, that human ingenuity has no specific limit. It's very unlikely, my judgment.

I believe he has made a positive assertion and it requires that he propose a method of committing fraud and a means of falsifying his proposed method as well.

This was the argument of the cold fusion skeptics, that it was the responsibility of the CF researchers to "propose a method -- a mechanism -- for cold fusion," and if they didn't, their claims could be dismissed.

The original ERAB report noted that it wasn't possible to prove that cold fusion was impossible. They were correct about that! However, how they used that was, to use a technical term, scuzzy. They bypassed normal scientific protocol, that research results are trusted pending identification and actual demonstration of artifact. We aren't at that point with Ross, because we don't have "research results," because we don't know what was being tested, and data is very limited. We have a "demonstration" of apparent heat generation. That's highly interesting, it's news, but it's not quite yet "science."

In other words, a way of proving that his proposed method could not have happened, such as looking for wires or computing how much energy 1 L of fuel can produce.

But, Jed, I'm not proposing a specific method. You are requiring that I be able to pull off a con like this, by inventing what is already acknowledged to be very difficult. I'm not, at all, asserting that Rossi is a con, only that we can't quite yet prove that it is not. Evidence can be asserted that makes it unlikely, but not impossible, for the reasons I've stated, and, in fact, here is what you require, simply as a suggestion, not as anything that I believe:

Rossi was able to buy off a few people. That's very simple. He can control whom he accepts as observers, still. Perhaps he buys off the Swedish writer for Ny Teknik. (Who, by the way, is doing a great job, and I'd be horrified if he thinks I'm accusing him of anything, I most certainly am not.)

Can you say that it is "impossible" for someone to corrupt experts or scientists?

When the numbers become great, yes, it becomes impossible. But when it is still a handful? As we know, lots of questions were raised about the January test. So that one, that group doesn't count! They were not allowed as much freedom as was allegedly allowed in the smaller groups shown the E-Cat at other times.

Arguments without any supporting evidence or a plausible real-world explanation or mechanism are not scientific.

I just gave a "plausible real-world explanation." Corruption. Happens in the real world, Jed.

Remember, though, this is not an argument for fraud, not at all. It is an argument against, at this point, considering fraud to be impossible. Impossible is a very big word.

Declaring out of the blue that there must be a factor of 1000 error or a factor of 5 error in flow calorimetry, without showing which of the parameters it applies to and how it might apply to them is not a scientific assertion. It is meaningless. It is like saying "I am sure that all experimental proof of special relativity must be wrong by a factor of 1000 and just because I say so that proves it's true."

What you are doing is assuming that all the data you have seen is valid, that there are no unknown conditions or tricks.

Remember the subject header here? What would Rossi say, if he could speak freely. Actually, he can speak freely, so what he's telling us is the answer to that question. "Speaking freely" allows making deceptive comments, if it serves his purposes, which, at this point, if this is not fraud, would be to throw would-be imitators off-track. I think, however, the question means, "if he had no motive to conceal the full truth." And we can speculate about this for a long time, or simply wait a few months, when it's quite possible, even likely, that the wraps will come off.

Reply via email to