(Guenter: Your e-mail is set so that responses here go to you.)
Guenter Wildgruber <gwildgru...@ymail.com
<mailto:gwildgru...@ymail.com>> wrote:
I would dare to say that Rossi is a tragic figure.
I sometimes feel that way . . . But it remains to be seen, doesn't it?
He has not failed yet. He may yet end up being history's first
trillionaire. He and Defkalion may reconcile and be friends again. Many
good things may happen to him. He deserves them all.
His personal idiosyncrasies just don't match the size of the problem.
Just three examples:
a) Spending 500k€ for an evaluation at U Bologna.
A black box-test would cost less than a 10th.
Ah, but he cancelled that. I did not think the U. Bologna test was
tragic, but it did strike me as a waste of money.
b) having an unreasonable cost/timescale: 1mio units this year in a
fully automated factory.
Rossi starts with unreasonable timescales. He sometimes achieves them.
He astounds me! I thought he would never get a 1 MW reactor working by
October, but apparently he did.
c) seemingly constantly changing his design. See his recent
cost-estimates for 10kW units. Ridiculous.
I regard these constant changes as a mark of genius. This is essential
part of inventing. Inventing -- as opposed to scientific research. Look
at the different designs for incandescent light bulbs in Edison's
notebooks in 1879. The variations are mind-boggling. His team went
through dozens of different ideas and variations as extreme as Rossi's.
They did not "stumble upon" the right design. They tried an incredible
range of things, but they kept zeroing or coming back to the more
practical ones.
Improvements should be split into product-generations. Messing these
up with small resources-he definitely has-,
is a recipe for disaster.
It was a recipe for success in Edison's case. Rossi seems to be
succeeding. He has made more progress than most other cold fusion
researchers combined.
Rossi's methods are not orderly.
Look at the tables for his setups. The cheapest of the cheap.
Cheap is good. The cheaper the better. The cheaper and easier it is to
make a product, the quicker sales ramp up, and the more money you make.
Not that is decisive, but simultaneously telling something about
fully automated factories this year, generates cognitive dissonance.
I see no contradiction. Here is the ideal that every capitalist yearns for:
A fully automated factory churning out ultra cheap products that people
everywhere want and need.
That is the key to making as much money as anyone can make. That's what
Edison had in the incandescent light, and Gates had in factories
producing CD-ROMs of Windows software. Few people in history have been
so fortunate as to come up with something like this. Rossi may yet join
their ranks.
- Jed
