On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Harry Veeder <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you came from a community that did not use levers and never > developed the rudiments of lever science, how would you react upon > hearing a story that one man shifted a stone with a branch that you > KNOW from the stones description should require at least 8 strong men? > > Is the story a tall tale? Was this man a giant? Perhaps the stone was > hollow. > If he is an ordinary man and the story is accurate, then he is a > magician who knows the magic of the lever. > If he claimed to be able to perform this feat because of a new technology that I was unfamiliar with, then I might be skeptical, but open to observing a demonstration. If he described the method saying he would use a thin bamboo pole pivoted on yonder tree, I would be skeptical not only of his new technology, which I was unfamiliar with, but also of the implausibility of a bamboo pole being strong enough, because between the tree and the rock, the technology is old. Unless he is claiming that when the new technology of leverage is used, that the bamboo takes on new strength, and the old laws don't apply. So, Rossi is claiming a new heat-producing reaction, and while I'm skeptical of it, I'm interested in his attempts to demonstrate it. But the implausibility I expressed above, was not of the reaction Rossi claims, but of intermediate physics that is not new, and that is necessary to believe his interpretation of the demo. The interpretation of the Oct 28 demo, and all the other steam demos, assumes that the power transfer to the water increases 8-fold at the onset (or within minutes) of boiling, and that requires an 8-fold increase in the temperature difference between the heating element and the water. Given the time it takes to increase the temperature of the heating element to its first-fold power transfer (hours), this is impossibly implausible. Or is Rossi also claiming that if heat is produced by nuclear reactions, then the thermodynamics of heat transport is completely different?
