Posted on 10/30/2011 9:02:17 PM PDT by Kevmo
That’s very different from building your technology, demonstrating the technology (however much one wants to denigrate the elegance of the demonstration), and then, after giving a customer the independent opportunity to test the technology (however much one wants to claim they know better than the customer how the technology should have been tested and evaluated), licenses the technology to the customer for them to physically take back to their own place of business and put through its paces.Who is the customer? We only have Rossi's claim that there is a customer.
I have real trouble with the idea that if this were a real "pre-sale approval" type demonstration for a real company that wished to keep it a secret, that they would make it public. It would be far more practical and reasonable to keep it secret until they were willing to go public.
However, if the purpose was to plant the idea among potential marks that this was "legitimate", then it makes perfect sense.
There are plenty of people who believe that Rossi is legitimate and that we are on the brink of a revolution comparable to the industrial revolution. I'm just not one of them. If some company starts selling "Mr. Fusion" in the near future, then that will prove my speculation wrong.
However, if there are throngs of people willing to give Rossi money to get on his "secret" waiting list (why not have a secret waiting list; everything else about it is secret), then I would say his efforts over the last year will pay off, whether he's legitimate or not. According to Kevmo (in an earlier post), Rossi has a five-year backlog of orders for the E-Cat. That's a lot of potential chumps.
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=516&cpage=6#comment-107295
Rossi is now offering the E-Cat for sale to any interested parties.
I look forward to hearing the first reviews by paying customers. (Or, watching Rossi disappear after failing to deliver working devices to those who have paid up front.)
Therefore, it interests me that so many seem willing to rush headlong (from my reading of the "evidence") into calling this a hoax and a scam.
Sure, it may be. But I don't see the telltale marks of that at the moment; in fact, quite the opposite.
I have real trouble with the idea that if this were a real "pre-sale approval" type demonstration for a real company that wished to keep it a secret, that they would make it public. It would be far more practical and reasonable to keep it secret until they were willing to go public
It seems to me, from my limited reading, that the demonstration had two purposes: (1) to license the technology to a company that was going to work on developing it or perhaps coming up with applications for it, and (2) through the licensing process, to obtain funds to finance privately the two-year academic study at the Universities of Bologna and Uppsala (Sweden) into, explicitly, "how" and "why" Rossi's catalyst works.
So, to the extent Rossi is also pursuing public academic research into his process, I could see that it would be helpful for it to be public. In fact, I could see the universities "suggesting" that consistent with the counter-needs of the company to remain secretive. This would bolster their research project considerably and may even attract other favorable attention.
However, if the purpose was to plant the idea among potential marks that this was "legitimate", then it makes perfect sense.
I guess.
But SO many people would have to be in on this. At some point the argument is the same as OJ's: that the entire LAPD and the forensic labs and the neighbors and so on were in a conspiracy to frame him for the murder of his wife and her friend.
I seriously doubt the universities in question would agree to engage in a deliberately faked research project. That's not to say they might not find flaws in the technology, even ones that a fatal to eventual commercialization. But it's doubtful they'd be complicit in outright fraud.
There are plenty of people who believe that Rossi is legitimate and that we are on the brink of a revolution comparable to the industrial revolution. I'm just not one of them.
Nothing wrong with being skeptical. I'd just be more inclined to agree with you if you had a basic science rationale or if I could see the hallmarks of a scam. I just don't at this point.
I mean: Rossi could be wrong in the end. But that doesn't automatically make this whole thing a scam.
However, if there are throngs of people willing to give Rossi money to get on his "secret" waiting list (why not have a secret waiting list; everything else about it is secret), then I would say his efforts over the last year will pay off, whether he's legitimate or not. According to Kevmo (in an earlier post), Rossi has a five-year backlog of orders for the E-Cat. That's a lot of potential chumps.
Too many logical leaps here for me, sorry.
Even if it's true that there's a waiting list or a backlog of orders "for the E-Cat," you've identified the catch right there.
Of course there would be many, many people (and, I would think, governments) who would like to be first in line to get this technology IF and when it is actually commercialized and deployed.
This is no different than people lining up or going on waiting lists to get the next iPAD or whatever. They may or may not have confidence that the technology will pan out the way it's being hyped, but the important thing is that NO ONE CAN FORCE THEM TO BUY IT.
They are signing up for the opportunity to get it first, if and when it becomes a consumer product. SO WHAT? It still has to be satisfactory to them before they buy it. And it still has to meet some inherent and explicit standards before it can be categorized as a salable item.
If Steve Jobs had advertised that he'd come up with an iPAD that allowed users to engage in time travel, there might be some people who got on a waiting list for it, thinking, well, you know he just might pull that off and, if he does, cool, I'll be first in line.
If two years later Jobs says "okay, here's the time travel iPAD" and it turns out it's a Timex watch with a MP3 player in it, is he really going to be able to rip off a bunch of people with that? Is he really going to be able to enrich himself off that scam? Are people on his waiting list just going to go, "oh, okay, Steve, whatever you say, here's my money?"
Nope.
If two years later Jobs says "okay, here's the time travel iPAD" and it turns out it's a Timex watch with a MP3 player in it, is he really going to be able to rip off a bunch of people with that? Is he really going to be able to enrich himself off that scam? Are people on his waiting list just going to go, "oh, okay, Steve, whatever you say, here's my money?"If people don't shell out the money until a working device is delivered, then there's no room for fraud.
But I seriously doubt that getting on the waiting list is free. Generally, you get your marks to pay up front (maybe even paying extra to get to the front of that 5-year waiting list), then you skip town.
BTW, Rossi is now offering to sell E-Cat devices to anyone who wants one:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=516&cpage=6#comment-107295
So, presumably we'll know soon. Either people start getting working E-Cat devices or Rossi collects lots of deposits (after all the hype he created over the last eleven months), and then disappears to some country without an extradition treaty with Italy.
It still feels like a scam to me, but maybe I'll be eating crow soon. :-)
I don’t think it’s a question of eating crow. As I said, nothing wrong with being skeptical. But I do think there’s no way to say it’s a scam right now.
I’ll have to check your link and see exactly what Rossi is saying the device he is selling will do and what are the “in accordance with manufacturer’s” purposes, etc.
And are you sure that’s a legitimate site? Of all we’ve talked about, that seems the most fishy of everything so far: that days after he’s licensed the technology to a customer and obtained a two-year university research committment, he starts selling stuff on the internet? Or is he “selling” pre-orders?
Looks to me like an offer to talk about sales arrangements, not an offer of sale.
When you contact that email address, it may be you simply end up talking over your interest in purchasing, costs, financing, import/export issues, shipping issues, and, most importantly, DELIVERY DATE (i.e., when the plants will be actually ready for sale, which would have to include the fact that they had met whatever regulations/laws apply in terms of safety, non-false advertising, etc.).
At this point, even if Rossi is a con-man, buyers are very different from investors -- and if they don't proceed accordingly, the law isn't very kind to them anyway. It's caveat emptor all the way, especially with something as controversial as this.
So, in my book, it'd be really hard to argue that any buyer could be scammed here except by outright, actionable fraud (Rossi doesn't even try to deliver a product that even begins to do what he says the e-Cat does.) And then, really, they are not scammed; they are simply defrauded.
That's different -- maybe not in practical result to the consumer, but as to whether or not the technology was viable, or potentially viable, in the first place.
Things do seem to be moving fast, eh.
And are you sure that’s a legitimate site?It's Rossi's site, and one of the things that "smell" about his setup. He claims it's a "peer-reviewed" journal, although he doesn't identify the peers who are supposedly reviewing the articles. As usual with Rossi, you have to take it word for it.
Don't want to put my full thinking on this on the internet (just old-fashioned that way, I guess). But I do think that maybe there is a method to the “madness” of trying to get this technology disseminated as widely as possible, as soon as possible.
I mean: other than pure profit motive (which, Lord knows, there's nothing wrong with that, either).
Look. If, for example, a government or a large corporation actually capable of (1) maintaining this process as a secret (of course, we know that won't be the case because of the university research that's supposed to occur, but bear with me here), and (2) mass producing this technology got hold of it in the very beginning, before any one else, um . . .
not to put too fine a point on it, but might not that entity be able to rule the world?
Would this be any different than if a government or some other powerful entity was able to take control of the world's oil supply?
I don't think so.
Sure, the world could still run on oil. But if e-Cat works the way Rossi says, and has the potential for commercialization and even major power plant applications that have been talked about, how valuable is oil going to be?
Not very.
EXCEPT, it would be very valuable, in fact critical, to any country that was shut out of the e-Cat technology (by the possessor thereof).
So if e-Cat were controlled by an oligarchy (that could wipe out competing LENR technology), and that oligarchy allowed only certain countries or entities to use it, then everybody else, still paying by the barrell, would not only be under crushing competition with countries paying almost nothing for all their energy, the countries still needing oil might be even more susceptible to predatory pricing by the remaining oil-producing nations.
There are many scenarios here that one could posit about how the world might be “ruled” if e-Cat were able to be strictly controlled by an oligarchy who could “allow” others to use it at will — or not.
So, Ludlum novel aside, if LENR is real, it's probably a good thing that this thing goes big and wide as soon as possible. :)
Oh, yes.
Re my last post: they’d also have to get Rossi out of the picture.
Looks to me like an offer to talk about sales arrangements, not an offer of sale.Right. A 1MW boiler isn't the type of device you sell on late-night TV.
If it is legitimate, that still leaves some very interesting questions. He is selling a fusion reactor that works by (his words) "unknown nuclear processes", and has never been tested by any government or other credible agency.
Some of the tests appeared to generate gamma rays, and in earlier statements Rossi seemed to indicate that was to be expected, but the claims of radioactivity seem to have disappeared in recent tests.
One tidbit: If Rossi just "sold" the E-Cat to his secret customer, what is he doing offering it for sale now. It would be interesting to know just what the relationship is between the buyer and Rossi.
This is another reason why I see this as not an offer to sell, but an offer to receive offers.
Obviously, there has to be some continuing relationship between the licensee and the licensor (Rossi).
It may be Rossi completed all the steps necessary for sale (safety regs, etc.) in building his various prototypes, so that now the e-Cat 1 MW could go into production immediately.
Still seems like there'd be quite a few steps before you could bring this machine to market, though. Of course, as I've been saying, that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate discussions about pre-orders.
I look at this whole thing not as a lawyer, but as a scientist.
Rossi claims to have come up with something that, speaking from a strictly scientific point of view, is highly unlikely. Fusion reactions typically take place under very high temperatures, which are needed to overcome what are called the “Coulomb force”. This is the force that causes two particles of the same charge to repel each other. The closer those two particles get, the stronger that Coulomb force becomes. As I recall from my physical chemistry class that I took eons ago, that force becomes almost infinite within an atomic radius. So, to overcome that force requires a HUGE amount of energy.
The basic premise of the “LENR”, or low energy nuclear reaction, is that nickel (atomic number 28) somehow soaks up hydrogen (atomic number 1) like a sponge, then—somehow—the nuclei fuse to become copper (atomic number 29). As I already said, to fuse the nuclei in this manner would require a HUGE amount of energy.
If Rossi has, indeed, managed to find a way to do this process without the enormous input of heat (millions of degrees) that one typically needs for fusion reactions, then it should be a simple enough matter to show, stoichiometrically, that this reaction had taken place. One merely needs to demonstrate that precise quantities of starting materials (nickel and hydrogen) entered the system, and that a precise quantity of copper and leftover starting materials resulted. As far as I know, this has not been done. Rossi provided (to someone, I forget who) a powder that he claimed came from his device, which contained nickel, copper, and iron (the presence of the latter unexplained; atomic number of iron is 26). But, if this is real, why can’t Rossi provide the device for independent testing by people having the analytical tools necessary for thorough analysis of starting and ending materials? That he has not done this stinks to high heaven.
A logical, not empirical, criticism is that, if attaining fusion at low temperatures were so easy, we’d see fusion happening spontaneously on earth all the time. A lightning strike could set off the reaction. We don’t see that.
Another criticism is that Rossi does not have a degree in, apparently, anything. He claims to have a degree from a university, but does not specify whether it is a bachelor, master, or PhD—and his claimed major is not actually listed at the university’s website. The engineering degree he claims to have is from Kensington, a mail-order degree mill in California that (I believe) is no longer operating. That begs a rather important question—given the hands-on nature of coursework in engineering, how did Rossi do his course work? Did the university ship him the project material, then he shipped back the finished projects for grading? (I’ve never seen a science curriculum that could lend itself to correspondance courses.) I don’t believe for a moment that someone with no science background at all developed a highly technical process through haphazard tinkering in his garage.
One other skepticism that I have is that Rossi supposedly came up with this process independently. While it is not impossible to do scientific research independently, it’s highly unlikely. Research equipment is expensive, and research takes time. Working independently, as we are supposed to believe Rossi has done, how did he manage to afford to buy all that equipment and not only have sufficient funds to live on, but to buy the house (which he’s now supposedly sold for funds)? If this guy does, indeed, have a day job that supports this lifestyle, that detail has never been mentioned.
There is also the fact of the lack of publication in any bona fide journal. Typically, the basic details of the scientific discovery are published before commercial products incorporating the discovery are developed. To get around the fact that established peer-reviewed journals wouldn’t publish his “findings”, he established his own internet journal. Being a scientist, I find the fact that he couldn’t convince experienced scientists (articles submitted to journals are typically reviewed by people who are experts in the field) that he had something worthwhile quite telling.
And last, I’ll just point out that Rossi’s behavior and statements concerning this eCat make my “spider sense tingle.” His claims are too grandiose. Plus, he has a history of past fraud. He supposedly developed a technique to make fuel oil from waste; what he managed to do was to take somewhat toxic waste and make very toxic waste.
I’m sorry this is so long; I see a lot of red flags here, which necessitate a rather lengthy description. And I’m not sure I even explained all of my reservations about this “technology.”
But, if this is real, why can’t Rossi provide the device for independent testing by people having the analytical tools necessary for thorough analysis of starting and ending materials?
Apart from what I, as a lay person, would describe as "good manners" in the science world, why would Rossi want to do this? IOW, if he can move forward with bringing his device to market (the ultimate testing ground, IMO) without this, why not?
I realize you are going to say "no, that violates the laws of physics," but what if the revolutionary is truly happening and this technology is IN FACT "violating" the supposed laws of physics -- why would the inventor of such technology, who clearly doesn't understand it all himself at this point, subject his process at this point to those who, by definition, would be rigidly applying the presumed laws of physics?
A logical, not empirical, criticism is that, if attaining fusion at low temperatures were so easy, we’d see fusion happening spontaneously on earth all the time. A lightning strike could set off the reaction. We don’t see that.
It doesn't appear to me that Rossi's process has been easily observed or easily accomplished. A counter logical criticism is that, since cold fusion is not a necessary function in nature (so far as we know), and would in fact be destructive (so far as we know), then nature has built-in (natural) obstacles to spontaneous or uncontrolled LENR, just as it does with nuclear fission.
Another criticism is that Rossi does not have a degree in, apparently, anything
Personally, this doesn't bother me in the least. I think we've all known people who become passionate about a subject and can teach themselves to understand the subject at a very high level.
Moreover, I see this as much more of a creative process, than an academic/intellectual problem. If LENR is possible, it seems to me it goes without saying that it's rather likely it would be discovered by someone who is quite outside the scientific mainstream, either in training or experience or personality or all three!
Also, if LENR is possible, I don't think it would ever be discovered apart from a sort of luck -- the luck that one makes for oneself, sometimes just by being extremely quirky and a nonlinear thinker.
I don’t believe for a moment that someone with no science background at all developed a highly technical process through haphazard tinkering in his garage.
Well, I'm not quite going that far, either! However, I would guess that it would be more on the accidental side by an unconventional actor than not.
Research equipment is expensive, and research takes time.
But does anyone really know what type of "research" Rossi pursued to, allegedly, create a LENR device? Since no one knows the catalyst/process, it seems to me one cannot speculate one way or the other on how much traditional research and traditional equipment and funding it took.
Being a scientist, I find the fact that he couldn’t convince experienced scientists (articles submitted to journals are typically reviewed by people who are experts in the field) that he had something worthwhile quite telling.
Generally, I agree with this point. That said, hasn't Rossi said, essentially, he knows the catalyst/process works, but he has yet to understand exactly "how" and "why" (hence the university research projects)?
I could see how he would be able to write a publishable article if he only has observations, not explanations or even theories.
Moreover, one could argue, this is another example of how any discovery that somehow called into question scientific orthodoxy would be treated.
And last, I’ll just point out that Rossi’s behavior and statements concerning this eCat make my “spider sense tingle
I respect a person's gut instincts and I don't find skepticism uncalled for here. I know nothing about the man. That said, except for one thing, I don't see a basis for conclusively rejecting this technology as a fraud at this point.
The one thing that would give me pause is your first point. Basically that LENR is more or less "impossible" because of Coulomb Force or a similar theoretical obstacle.
Now, admittedly, you said LENR was "highly unlikely," and that is not the same thing as "impossible." But I think what most people mean by "highly unlikely" is, well, "impossible!"
I just don't think those two concepts should be conflated when it comes to something such as this. And it seems to me that's the crux of most of the "it's a fraud" objections: that, at bottom, cold fusion is impossible. That's really the only objection that can't be brushed off.
But is it . . . impossible?
Of course he didn’t. Flying rats can’t read.
Does your FReeper handle mean that you were once a Judge Advocate General?
Oh, goodie! More “secret” information
***I agree, that aspect of it is a bunch of horse hockey.o The PESWiki guys were the ones who arranged the meet between N ASA and Rossi. But this is childishness.
So, he’s been successfully conned before, but this time it’s different.
***Hey, you know how to argue without using classical fallacies. That’s unusual for someone from your perspective.
A link to any exonerating evidence would be nice. Rossi’s convictions and prison time are waved away with the author “imagining” that there must be exonerating evidence, although he apparently doesn’t know of any.
***In other words, imagining the evidence is an argument from silence. A classic fallacy.
So, we’re supposed to ignore Rossi’s well-documented personality problems, but it’s OK to use the author’s claim of Krivit having personality issues as an attack against him.
***I really don’t care about Rossi’s personality. I care about his data.
So says Rossi. We don’t have any actual evidence of this. All we have is Rossi’s claim, and his claim that his “secret company” was satisfied with the test.
***There were others there, like the author of this article. This is the first time I’ve caught you in a distortion. That’s unusual to find someone who can actually stick to the facts to a reasonable extent — until now, but I’ve lowered my standards for pathological skeptics.
So says Rossi. He claims to have heated his factory for six months on a single “fueling”, but he hasn’t been able (or willing) to publicly demonstrate the system working for more than a few hours.
***His customer seemed satisfied.
I would be fascinated to know who theses “very credible” board of directors actually are.
***Unfortunately, here you have slipped into an invalid argument from silence. Produce evidence for or against their credibility.
And, of course, the Mafia would never interfere with someone who might be muscling in on their business (which is not cold fusion research).
***Straw argument. The mafia had moved in on waste management, a more-or-less acknowledged fact on the ground. Rossi’s business was in the way.
I am seeking a business relationship with Andrea Rossi.
***This is probably Sterling Alan’s way of saying “full disclosure”. I would love to be in a business relationship myself with Rossi. I would try my best to discover ways this could be a scam, and I would also love to be involved with such a tremendously disruptive technology if it’s real. I’ve looked enough into the forensics to think that it is similar to what the author says, 99% chance it’s real.
If it is true, do you agree that fact has meaning?
***Well, whaddaya know... crickets.
With so many seagulls swarming around Rossi, if he did not sell his house and fund this thing himself, it is very unlikely that such a fact would go unnoticed.
Well, crickets again.
Don’t expect the argumentation to be any better than the crickets.
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