Rebuttal to Krivit's Accusation that Andrea Rossi is a Fraudster

Rossi could bring in some shills.
***conspiracy theory

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2800077/posts

Unfortunately, if Rossi hired a bunch of actors to pretend to be the customer reps, created an elaborate year-long special-effects-derived series of demos, bribed, hypnotised or otherwise fooled Focardi, Levi, Kullander, Essen, Bianchini, Stremmenos and convinced a bunch of Greek crooks to set up a dummy company called Defkalion to pretend to fight with him over the non-existent eCat, to perpetuate the illusion and spin it off into a competing mirror-scam and convinced his former partners to set up another company called Ampenergo to pretend that they had a contract for The Americas for a substantial sum or that they just did this with no proof because they have worked with Rossi and trust him because he’s such a fine fellow, arranged for Piantelli, Miley and a host of others to try to fool the world into thinking that cold fusion was real, got NASA, SPAWAR, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and The Defense Intelligence Agency to say nice things about the field, got Bushnell to make a fool of himself, sold his profitable company to his ex-partners in order to spend that wealth on a multi-million dollar scam; certain that once he got all the above ducks in a row he would pretend to sell the first device and then reel in the true target of his dastardly plan – the second (this time genuine) buyer of a 1MW plant that will net him $2 million dollars until they want their money back or sucker a $100 million dollar deal under the table because he has experience in pulling the wool over all these idiotic eyes and knows that they will just take his word for it and not want to test if his 1MW plant can heat a small village without truckloads of coal or oil or a big fat electric cable coming into the container from beneath the floor (no you can’t lift the carpet!) and that, in order to pull this off, Rossi had to risk discovery by interviewing all the people he subsequently fooled so that he could only invite the gullible Professors and not the brilliant anonymous posters on the Internet who surely would have found him out – then all bets are off and I’m with the guys who think that Rossi is an idiot and they are all geniuses .

. I guess that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were legit.
***Straw argument. Classic logical fallacy. You asked if the attendees had more evidence than the rest of us, and yes, they do. That immediately leads to a wider conspiracy theory, which even you acknowledge by saying they could be shills. The wider the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is true, and the theory will eventually pop like an expanding balloon.

Arggh, I was making a reply this morning, and my iPad ate it. So, here's for another try, when I'm not up against being late for work.

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?

It's not so much a matter of good manners, as it is validation of one's results. People actually misinterpret experiments or get odd results all the time; part of the process of science is to publish one's results with enough detail that other scientists can replicate the experiment. There is, right now, a rather prominent controversy concerning chronic fatigue syndrome, in which the original report has been discredited because not everyone trying to replicate the experiments has seen the same results. In that case, the original scientists were not trying to scam or hoodwink anyone; they are honest scientists who overlooked a crucial (but unknown to them) fact. My first publication reported results that contradicted the results of a prominent scientist in the field. Rossi's refusal to share his methods looks more like an attempt to hide something (as in, to hoodwink people) than it does an attempt to protect his intellectual property. As far as that goes--if he were to publish in an accepted journal, that would sufficiently protect his intellectual property. But he can't publish, and he can't patent--most likely, because in both cases, experts have examined his claims and found them lacking.

As far as violating the laws of physics, that simply cannot happen. I will get more into that when I respond to your other post later in this thread.

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.

I don't know that it even makes sense to talk about what are or are not "necessary functions" in nature. Nature is what it is. I would almost say, regardless of what we think, desire, or perceive, but that isn't quite true. In physics, you can change the nature of a system by observing it... which is really, really weird, and why I chose to study a branch of chemistry, and not physics. The fact is, that if Rossi can get cold fusion going with a small input of energy, we'd see cold fusion happening whenever there is a lightning strike, and the process would be well documented by now. This is not the case.

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've certainly seen people who become passionate and teach themselves quite a bit about a subject. But their knowledge of the subject is usually narrow, and they miss huge areas of knowledge that a formally trained person would have learned as part of their education. Look up the "radioactive boy scout" for an excellent example of that. I do not see such a person as having the necessary breadth of knowledge to make leaps of genius. From what I've observed, such leaps are made by people who know just about everything there is to know about an area, who put that knowledge together in a way that no one else has ever done. Kary Mullis, whom I admire greatly, demonstrated such genius when he developed PCR.

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.

The actual details of the research are almost irrelevant here. Even if we can accept the premise that a guy with no formal physics training whatsoever haphazardly discovered a process which would seem to violate the laws of physics while tinkering in his garage, there is the question of testing it. For one thing, without any instrumentation, how would he even know that he had something new?

But, giving him the benefit of the doubt (for just this one argument), let's say that he was genuinely embarked on a planned course of experimentation. He would have to measure and test along the way, or he would have no way to see if or how much progress he had made towards his goal. So, either he needs some equipment, or he needs access to university or industrial facilities that have the equipment he needs to test his process. At a minimum, I'd say he needs a couple of centrifuges, a balance or two, various labware (beakers, mortars and pestles, spatulas, centrifuge tubes, etc.), a Geiger counter (and probably a gamma ray detector), an oven, a mass spectrometer, a selection of chemicals and reagents, plus the lab "consumables" (gloves, breathing masks, etc.). Even if he were to get used equipment, I think my little shopping list could easily surpass $50,000 or $100,000, because none of that stuff is cheap. That seems like quite an expense for a guy without an income, who is also maintaining his own house and, presumably, paying bills and buying food. Sure, he could send samples to a mass spec lab, but some of those items he absolutely would have to maintain on-site. And if he were sending out samples for analysis, he'd have nice print-outs and probably Excel files of the exact isotopic composition of his samples, along with pretty graphs, all of which he could show people as evidence he really did develop a new process.

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!"

Think of Coulomb force as being similar to the effect you get when trying to push two magnets together, south to south or north to north. The closer you push the magnets, the more they repel each other, and the more force it takes to hold them together. Rossi essentially is claiming he found a way to negate that force. I just don't think so.

Now, I will point out something about my language use as a scientist. For some reason, we scientists do not like to communicate anything as an absolute. That's why you see, sprinkled throughout scientific writing, those words I call "hedge words": probably, we think, it could be, this supports our view, etc. So, I'll happily say something is highly unlikely, instead of impossible. The way I like to explain that is through quantum physics. My physics teacher explained that, with quantum physics, a particle placed inside a box can spontaneously appear outside the box, without the box being opened. This event has a low probability, but is not impossible. So, imagine that, instead of putting a tiny particle inside a box, you put your car in your garage. The car, being composed of countless tiny particles, could spontaneously appear in your neighbor's driveway without anyone opening your garage. That event is highly unlikely--but not impossible. (And if I were you, I'd still yell at the neighbor for "borrowing" your car, and refuse to believe his ramblings about quantum events.)

Okay, here is where I promised to explain how physical laws work.

What I was trying to say was that particular evaluation was based on a reaction *expected* solely on the "law of physics."

IOW, the law of physics says nickel and hydrogen react in such a way and copper is produced in such a way and the amounts of nickel and hydrogen that are input determine the amount of copper that is output in such a way.

If an inventor, say, stumbled upon a reaction that simply did not occur the way the law of physics said it "would" ("should") -- let's say there was no denying that something else was going on, and that something else was presently replicable BUT NOT EXPLAINABLE, but rather, in fact, it somehow CONTRADICTED the expected (orthodox) way in which these elements were "known" to react ---

As I said, why would an inventor take a process he knows is replicable, but is, at least at the moment, unorthodox, and subject it to "testing" by people who would only rigidly evaluate it against orthodoxy?

The laws of physics are absolute and immutable. There is no breaking or bending them. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. They may, however, be interconverted--hence, Einstein's famous equation, E=MC^2, which explains the mathematical relationship between energy and matter.

If I were to assume that Rossi is legitimate, then I would absolutely expect to see the process behave according to the laws of physics. Which means that the inputs and outputs can be precisely measured, and the composition of the outputs can be predicted. On paper, the reaction hydrogen (atomic number 1) + nickel (atomic number 28) does add up to copper (atomic number 29). Those atomic numbers all refer to protons, which are charged particles, and that reaction does not take into account the neutrons and electrons.

The problem is that it takes a huge amount of energy to force that hydrogen proton to fuse into the nickel nucleus to form copper (because of the repulsive Coulomb force), and for this process to produce energy means that matter must be converted into energy according to Einstein's equation (there is no other possibility). All of these entities--the hydrogen, nickel, copper, and energy (in the form of gamma rays) are measurable. A net gain of energy would result if the amount of energy produced by the matter to energy conversion was greater than the amount of energy needed to force the nuclei to fuse.

**If** someone has come up with a way to overcome the Coulomb force without resorting to the use of massive amounts of very hot energy, the products of such a reaction are predictable and measurable, according to the laws of physics. A large part of my skepticism towards Rossi is the fact that he has provided no evidence of this happening, nor allowed independent verification of this process. If it is happening, analyzing the reaction components is simple enough that an undergraduate could do it. So, why hasn't that been done?

As for your hypothetical of mixing two colored substances together and getting a substance of a color that you wouldn't have predicted from the colors of the original two substances--well, that happens all the time in chemistry! I remember one experiment in undergraduate school, where we mixed two colorless clear solutions together and stirred them. After about two minutes of stirring, the clear colorless mixture in the beaker turned deep blue!

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