2011/8/4 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>: > Now, if you assessed the probability at 70%, rationally you would bet 40 > euros against a lesser amount from me. Suppose my bet is X euros. Forget the > charity thing, it complicates it. >
It is impossible to assess probabilities for one time events, such as for the reality of Rossi's cold fusion. They are black swans and probabilities associated to them are meaningless. But it is not impossible to invest money on that one time event, because it does not require rationality to justify human intuition. By the way, it is true that people continuously does that mistake that they are assessing probabilities for one time events. This can cause lots of harm in financial sector, because they continuously underestimate the power of black swans, and result is financial crisis like in 2008. Therefore your "game theory" calculations are just unscientific, and you really do not understand well game theory, if you try to apply it here. > > However, my position, and you have to understand that I'm not willing to bet > on "Rossi unreal," there are way to many unknowns, and I've never claimed > that the E-cat is "unreal." In this subject, even partial success for Rossi is greatest success since invention of fire. Therefore there is only two possible outcomes, either E-Cat is 100% real or 100% unreal. Nothing in between. If you try to see such gray shades between, you are mistaken. Here only black and white are possible outcomes. > What I've been claiming is that Rossi has > fraudulently exaggerated the tests (mostly by allowing others to make > assumptions that favor him, and he obviously encouraged that), and that, > further, he appears not to have solved the reliability problem -- assuming > he has anything at all. If you get 2 kilowatts of power from cold fusion experiment in every 10 000 demonstrations it is reliable enough to invest few teraeuros for cold fusion research. I remind you that financial value of cold fusion device that can produce net energy, is few gigadollars per hour! Therefore if we have even slightest hint that there is any anomalous nuclear fusion events at low temperature, ALL available global resources would be diverted to cold fusion research. Because global economy is depended on energy and it suffers chronic lack of energy. With free or almost free energy, global economy could quadruple in matter of few years. Nuclear energy is so valuable, that even if we need some precious metal to do the job, then we would go to asteroids and dig it from there. People often forget how valuable energy is, because we are surrounded by energy. > So what I'd bet on would be that he fails to deliver > by a certain deadline. > Natural deadline for scientific validation of E-Cat is the end of this year. > He put himself in a position where he must complete development under the > gun, and he claims to be working 18-hour days. He may well be! These are the > conditions that lead me to expect he is likely to fail. He cannot fail, because it takes just few weeks to build working 1MW plant, if not just few days. What Rossi is doing is making it better, i.e. doing research. Few weeks ago Rossi stated, that he started again all over from the beginning, because he found more efficient solution. There is no indications that he lags with the schedule. More problematic is whether Defkalion is ready to start manufacturing at November. If they are going to, they really should start heavy investments for building a factory very soon. > Rational bets (also called "investments") > balance expected reward times probability of success with expected loss. In > 1989 and the ensuing years, a lot of people and companies bet that cold > fusion could be commercialized. They lost the bet, but that doesn't mean it > was a foolish bet. It was not rational bet, because there is no such thing as probability for one-time-event. > It's been said that perhaps he was just turning down the power because it > had started to overheat. Here's the problem with that: Lewan had turned away > to go look at the hose. Lewan's video shows no obvious steam coming from the > hose. Then there is steam, much more. Lewan turns back to Rossi, who is > seeing nonchalantly withdrawing his hand from the heat controls, gazing at > the camera like there is absolutely nothing on his mind. I could imagine him > whistling. Nothing going on here? Lewan doesn't ask him. That would be rude, > eh? However, the sounds of boiling apparently stop. > > Lewan goes over and videos the input current. The same as before. It had > only been a couple of minutes. This kind of foolish speculation and accusation is outright insulting! Mats checked steam several times during the 7 hours what he was there present besides the working E-Cat. You are a fool that if you think that 5 min video does capture it all! > The whole point of Rossi, > the reason why everyone got so excited, was the level of the claims and the > implied reliability. If Rossi's device works with net output power of 100W one time out of 10 000, it is phenomenal breakthrough and greatest invention since fire. Even fire does work every time. Sometimes woods are too wet that it is vain to try to rub them together. > Everyone -- including me -- believed that it was very unlikely that > a boiler could produce very wet steam. Surely this was a minor problem! > It is minor problem, because still, no-one here in vortex has not seen a device that can produce very wet steam. Not even in very theoretical circumstances. Joshua has linked few papers that describe some setups and conditions where it is possible to produce up to 90% wet steam, but indeed they are very special conditions. > I've come to the conclusion that the Rossi arrangement is a very effective > atomizer. It will create steam that is possibly above 95% water by mass. You > do know that this steam will still be very light, right? The density of > steam at 1 bar is about 0.590 kg/m^3, as I recall. The density of water is > 1000 kg/m^3. If we have a kilogram of steam, the volume would be 1.695 m^3. > For the this steam to become 5% quality, it would be mixed with 19 kg of > liquid, with a volume of 0.019 m^3. The total volume is hardly budged by the > water, it becomes 1.714 m^3. By volume, this steam is almost 99% vapor. > This is what you are meaning that people do not have experience of steam engineering, because they have not never seen such device before, that produces very wet steam. And I can assure you that no-one here has ever seen a device that can produce 95% wet steam! I wish good luck for building such a device that can produce such a high level steam with temperature that was 2 degrees above normal boiling point, like in December demonstration. Wet steam theory is just a crack pot theory. > If only 5% of the water is being vaporized, > then the steam velocity will be, seat-of-the-pants roughly, 1/20 of that > generated if all the water were vaporized. It would be "weak steam." Studies > of the steam expected from full vaporization of the water claimed by Rossi > to be pumped in show very high velocities, and almost all this steam would > reach the end of the outlet hose. > Kettle steam comparison with Andrea Rossi's Energy Catalyzer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsqSEw6Nti8 This setup is very similar than Rossi's setup, expect that there is no water inflow at all (actually i was previously mistaken here before, because water inflow rate is actually minor contributor and it is just one extra rather linear variable for calculations). There is two tests where water boiling power is 4.4 kW and 900 W. This test clearly falsifies all "steam velocity calculations" presented by many. 4.4 kW steam is not that impressive and it would be even less that if there is continuous water inflow. - Jouni
