At 11:52 PM 5/10/2011, you wrote:
The same personality trait which shows up as sloppiness is also what
makes him say "low level heat is useless! Forget about anything less
than a kilowatt!" He does not want to fool around with
difficult-to-measure reactions that are only of scientific interest.
I like that. Peter Gluck loves that! He has been saying that for years.
I sympathize with the researchers who have been working with 50 mW
reactions for years, at the ENEA and elsewhere. It wasn't as if they
wanted such small reactions. The were hoping to learn more and then
scale up. They might have succeeded eventually. They learned a lot,
and their knowledge may still be of use. I hope they get lots of
funding. We need bold people like Rossi, and careful people too.
Both, yes. I've argued Smaller is Better, but only for exploratory
research. Once you have something that you can reproduce, then making
it bigger and stronger becomes the new goal. You *start* with the
small system and explore the hell out of it, you don't just leap to
bigger until you have something solid.
Then you go for amplified effect, under the same small conditions.
Then, when you have a reliable small demonstration, you scale it up
for the impressive demo and applications.
I don't know what Rossi did, but, my guess, he wasn't continuously
building 12 kW reactors. If so, he probably slowed himself down and
simply got lucky.
All the speculations are a distraction until there is a reasonable
amount of supporting evidence, circumstantial or direct.
I think there is already enough supporting evidence. I have no doubt
Essen and Kullander are right. We do not need to rely on Rossi's
judgement or techniques. It would be inappropriate to do so. E&K
provided an independent evaluation, which is the next best thing to
an independent replication. The whole point was to avoid depending on Rossi.
The confirming group is still way too small. People can be bought, if
you have a few hundred million Euros at stake. More people than you
might think. Maybe I'm lucky that nobody ever offered me a few
hundred thousand euros, or a million euros, to lie.
But when replication is independent, this all disappears.
If I took the cash, I'd do it knowing that my reputation would be
garbage, for the rest of my life. Or I wouldn't take it, and I'd blow
the whistle that it was even offered. Not an easy call, in fact. It's
not my reputation that would protect the world from me doing this,
but something deeper, like what happens after I die. Did I cause
harm? Was that the effect of my life? How much is *that* worth?
