[Vo]:Yes, this was a fiasco, but it was also first principle proof of the claims

[Jed Rothwell]

Robert Lynn wrote:

And you don't know if the water level in the huge reactor reservoir is 
rising or falling.  And you know that there are big problems with the 
secondary loop calorimetry not remotely matching the primary in the 
one instance (Mat's walk around video) where we know the primary 
power.  Give up, Rossi has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of 
victory yet again.

I agree. That is a nice turn of phrase, and it describes the situation 
well. In many important ways he did. Look at Lewan's report. Lewan 
cannot tell whether the heat flux was 2, 3 or  6 kW. What kind of test 
is that?!? Look at the thermocouple meter. It can hold 4 k-type 
thermocouples. Only two were used. Rossi might have installed 1 or 2 
more, installed a plastic T fitting in the hose, and then measured the 
water temperature downstream. That meter can record on an SD card. He 
might have recorded all temperatures, giving us a complete data set from 
the inlet at one location, and the outlet at two or three locations.

There are dozens of things Rossi might have done to reduce the confusion 
and to produce ironclad proof that no rational person would question. By 
any reasonable, conventional standard, this test was a fiasco. If Rossi 
was an undergraduate I would give him no better than a C. As I told 
Rossi himself, he was sloppy and his attitude expresses contempt for the 
people who came hundreds of miles to observe the experiment.

HOWEVER, you must not overlook fundamental physics and first principle 
proof. Do not miss the forest for the trees! The reactor continued 
boiling for four hours. The reactor surface remained at ~80°C. A person 
touching the outlet hose four hours after the power was cut jumped away 
because the hose was so hot. There is no question that this reactor 
continued to produce massive levels of heat long after the power was 
cut. That is physically impossible unless there was kilowatt-levels of 
heat being produced inside it.

Yes, it may be impossible for us to ever determine whether there were 2 
kW or 6 kW of heat being generated. But to assert that because the 
results are so inaccurate that the answer must be 0 kW (no heat) is 
outlandish and grotesque ignorance. To assert, as Krivit did, that 33 MJ 
was "saved up" and came out of the machine twice (during the warm up and 
again during heat after death) is a claim from the far reaches of cloud 
cuckoo land. Nothing Rossi has said or done is 0.001% as crazy as that, 
or the other assertions being made here that you can boil water for four 
hours in a machine of this description with no power input, or that heat 
can magically defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It is intensely annoying that Rossi did the test in this ridiculous 
manner, forcing us to scramble to try to determine whether was 2 kW or 6 
kW. But you must not let your annoyance interfere with your analysis of 
the facts. Do not throw up your hands and declare "there was no heat!" 
because of the way Rossi acts. This is physics, not a beauty contest. 
Behavior does not count.

That was anomalous nonchemical heat. There is no chance there was a 
hidden wire or hidden source of chemical heat.

People who are obsessed about the poor quality of the instrumentation 
and data collection and the poorly positioned thermocouple are missing 
the point. You can ignore all quantitative data from this experiment. 
You can assume the worst case scenario for the outlet thermocouple 
placement problem. Yet _despite all that_, you can still be absolutely 
certain it was producing anomalous heat. It resembles Fleischmann's heat 
after death boil off experiments which do not require any numerical 
analysis to be certain they show anomalous heat. The appearance of the 
experiment alone is enough to tell you it is working.

Actually, the most elegant and best physics experiments are like this. 
They are self-evident without the need for numeric analysis. The 
configuration, appearance and behavior constitute proof of the claim. 
From that point of view, Rossi's test was excellent.

My impression is that numerical analysis is not Rossi preferred mode of 
thinking. He is an old fashioned hands-on inventor, like Edison. Edison 
had a stronger grasp of theory than he let on, or than many people 
credit him. But he did not like numerical analysis. When Edison and his 
team were trying work out how to build the world's first power stations 
and distribution network in Manhattan, around 1880, Edison assigned the 
job to an old German physicist. (I think he was German.) The old guy 
promptly set about making a physical scale model of downtown Manhattan, 
stringing little copper wires around and measuring resistance. A 
younger, formally trained physicist who understood the laws of 
electricity better than Edison and his cronies saw that and was 
"horrified." He modeled the network mathematically and determine how 
much wire of what gauge would be needed. This was a better method but it 
was numerical and physics-based whereas Edison was workbench-based. 
Rossi is emphatically the same kind of old-school make-it-and-find-out 
kind of guy.

- Jed