What is it with the Italian national identity ? Brilliance in art and science and idiocy in politics?
Do their politicians completely fear and distrust science and/or do the citizens expect miracles of a field that may seem to be closer to magic, in the tradition of alchemy?... or more to the point - does the national culture unduly influence what is being reported about Rossi, and Mills, or Rossi in the context of Mills? Actually, that is not the real point of this post - which started out as a coincidental reappearance of particular nickel alloy, known since before Verdi's opera Othello premiered at La Scala. But talk of alloys is pretty cold, or semifreddo at best, and needs some warm regards... so we go back the shocking story of Italian Law enforcement officials charging the country's top seismologist with manslaughter, after failing to predict a 2009 catastrophe! Never mind that Earthquakes are impossible to predict with any accuracy. In fact, according to the website for the USGS, no major earthquake has ever been predicted in advance ! Never mind the failing efforts by seismologists to debunk the myth of a major Roman quake on May 11 which half of Rome thought was going to happen - and it did not. How can there be such a high-to-low level "disconnect" in the national mentality? Enzo Boschi - president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics will go to trial with six other scientists, so this is no laughing matter, or is it? Essentially, it is a national disgrace for Italy, even more damning than the antics of that buffoon at the top - Silvio Berlusconi (BTW he is the longest-serving PM since Mussolini.) Perhaps the Italian-ego will only recover if Andrea Rossi succeeds with his energy device. (or Piantelli comes forward with something better). To be clear, Italian science (in contrast to politics) has been top-notch historically: Da Vinci, Galileo, Volta, Galvani, Fermi, Marconi, and many more. And all of the above commentary is to preface the device of a lesser known Italian-American transplant whom you may never have heard of - Gianni A. Dotto, descendent of Galileo. Less than top notch. Unfortunately, he is best known for Dotto's ring - a quack cancer cure. But that could be a trifling part of the larger story since it did seem to somehow cohere 30,000 amps from thin air, so to speak. Anyway - this post was designed to create a little mystery over the connection of Dotto's ring to recent events which can be grouped under the category of the "Rossi effect" or more accurately the "Arata effect" with a dose of the "Mills effect". And for the rest of this convoluted tale, you may want to dig out the one detail from the patent, which can be found here: http://www.rexresearch.com/dotto/dotto.htm To cut-to-the-chase ... the coincidence which seemed meaningful enough for me to waste half an hour with another off-the-wall attempt at dramatizing the fringe science of E-Cat ... is the alloy responsible for the Dotto ring effect, and for Brian Ahern's successful experiment, and possibly for the Rossi effect as well - and it is the same (or close) copper-nickel alloy known since 1887 as "constantan" which Romanowski has shown to be far superior to palladium for the spillover hydrogen effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantan The larger question is what is important about a negative temperature coefficient of resistance and why is it accentuated in a nanoparticle, especially in the context of a ceramic support (which is a semiconductor - zirconia)? And don't forget the 30,000 internal amps. The answer is probably a variation on the quantum dot theme - involving a photoconductor in contact with a "semimetal" (a material with a very small overlap between the bottom of the conduction band and the top of the valence band). A semimetal thus has no band gap and a negligible density of states at the Fermi level. A metal, by contrast, has an appreciable density of states at the Fermi level because the conduction band is partially filled. If you can combine a metal, semimetal and semiconductor with nano-geometry - then this strange mix may become a either a gateway for the zero point field or to fractional hydrogen ... And thanks to Fermi - another Italian job. Jones
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