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.
