Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
loud! -- while assuming other people will not notice these things, it
is impossible not to entertain profound uneasiness about the claims.
Understated, Jed.
Darn right it's understated. I bit my tongue. I have been biting it for
a year. You can see the scars.
I would bet a dollar to a doughnut that Levi doesn't believe it's for
real, no matter what he says in interviews.
Hmmm . . . That is not my impression, but you could be right. Villa
expresses many doubts. Perhaps Levi shares them with him.
The good news -- we hope -- is that Levi says he will do further tests,
lasting at least one day or more. See:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3083834.ece
In his blog, Rossi denied there would be more tests. More confusion,
more misinformation.
Levi's report is a travesty, which could have been bettered by any
12th grade chemistry student. I cannot believe that that was a report
prepared by someone who thinks he has just witnessed the biggest
breakthrough in the last three decades. (I don't mean his
/measurements/ were poor; I mean the /report/ was D- material, totally
slipshod, just thrown together.)
The report was thrown together in a week. It was a rush job. But I think
you should cut him some slack. In my experience, elderly professors
often do a poor job writing papers of this nature. They usually take a
lot longer to write a short report. Plus, I think a big problem may be
that English is Levi's second language. I would have a heck of a time
writing a report like that in Japanese, and I might sacrifice some
quality because I spend so much time getting the language right.
(On the other hand, if it were me writing in a second language, you can
be darn sure I would run it past a native speaker, so there would be no
gross mistakes. I made some corrections to the English version of the
Levi paper in the LENR-CANR.org version, as I noted at the top of the
first page.)
As I said in one of my responses to this list,
"after reading Levi's report, that's what it looks to me like it
is. In short, it's a disaster on wheels for the field of cold fusion"
I hope not! That's what I fear. That's why I am so upset about the
confusion and misdirection, or whatever it is. And assuming the thing is
real, it would so easy to get it right! It would be easy to provide
convincing information. That galls me to no end. That's the story of
cold fusion. Good experiments. Good results. Botched communication.
I had been starting to think I believed this, until I read Levi's
report. Even if he'd only written it up for a few friends (or his
Facebook page), if he thought this was for real, I have to believe
he'd have done a more thorough job of reporting on it.
Actually, I thought the slipshod writing and the obvious haste gave it a
note of verisimilitude. I thought "ah, that's a genuine Italian
professor alright." I have edited some first-draft papers as bad as that.
Ed Storms called it "amateurish." I agree.
- Jed
