On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mary Yugo <maryyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> There are a lot of these claims, aren't there? >>> >>> >> Yes and so far, all have been scams or failures or both. >> > > Untrue. The Curies' claim of anomalous energy was not a failure. > Muon-catalyzed fusion and the fusor are real, and I expect Taleyarkhan's > sono fusion is real. It probably does not produce significant heat. > Not the same at all. The web site in question is full of claims of free energy or practical energy based on some exotic new physical phenomenon. Of your examples, only sono fusion comes close (as a claim), and none of them have delivered as practical energy sources, so in that sense they are failures, although not scams. Curie did not claim a new source of practical energy (in the sense of the web site in question), and she did not even discover radioactivity; that was Becquerel. She never measured heat from radioactivity. She identified and isolated 2 new radioactive elements: polonium and radium (and coined the term radioactivity). Of course, she was right about the radioactivity, but never claimed it as a source of energy, and of course natural radioactivity has never been used as a source of energy. Muon-catalyzed fusion and the fusor both produce fusion, and so are real, but neither is useful as a source of energy, and so in that sense are failures. But in neither case has anyone claimed to have demonstrated practical heat. A lot of people had hopes that they might be able to get practical heat out of them, so although the physics is well-understood, no one has ever succeeded, or claimed to succeed in generating useful heat. That's a big difference from the claims on the web site, where anomalous and practical heat *are* claimed, and the physics is not understood. In sono fusion, there is neither evidence for nuclear reactions, nor practical heat, and the physics is dubious, although here some grandiose claims were made. So this is the most like the claims on the web site. But you missed one example where claims of practical heat from a novel phenomenon were realized: fission. When people realized the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium fission, they immediately began to envision power too cheap to meter, and weapons to end all war. Well, power and weapons were realized, but unfortunately it's not cheap, and we still have war. In this case, though, the physics was well-understood, and the predictions were based on that, and not on claims of unexplained heat in some demo. The first fission reactor produced less than a watt of power, but was completely convincing because of the neutrons. Within a few years, they needed the Columbia river to cool reactors designed to produce plutonium. That was a pretty convincing demo. > > As many people have pointed out, all attempts to fly before the Wright > brothers failed, but that did not mean the Wrights did not fly. > Obviously not, but you're missing the point. Skeptics doubt Rossi fundamentally because of the lack of evidence. But a lot of people believe him because of the scientists that seem to be convinced. Considering that sort of meta-evidence, the fact that he enlists an organization that promotes a lot of failed free-energy scams or proposals, suggests that he has been unable to enlist a more legitimate organization that sells power to the people.
