I meant to write: "If you don't believe it because Rossi is a dodgy person, go ahead and SAY that. Just don't pretend you have some sophisticated technical reason."
It is perfectly valid to reject a claim because the person making the claim looks like a crook. That is not a technical reason, but it is rational and justified. What Abd is doing is making a rational judgement based on personality and then imagining he is deciding based on a technical problem; i.e., if you don't know the source of heat, you can't be sure the thermometer really is steady for 18 hours. Yes, you can be sure of that. Just keep an eye on it. What Cude, Robert Park and the editors of Sci. Am. are doing is rejecting all cold fusion claims no matter how legitimate the researcher may appear to be. These people have no scientific basis for their opinions. They are irrationally opposed, the way a creationist opposes evolution. Such behavior is widespread. It is not surprising or unusual. You will not learn anything from reading what such people write because they know nothing about the subject and they have no basis for their beliefs. I am on record expressing grave reservations about Rossi's personality and his flamboyant claims. I have said this time after time. I have pointed out blatant contradictions in his claims. I have said that I believe his claims despite this. I believe the temperature difference was a steady 5 deg C for 18 hours, because I assume Levi and others are credible. I could be wrong about that, naturally. I have never denied that it *might be* a scam. That seems unlikely, albeit somewhat more likely today than it did yesterday! I also believe the claim because many cold fusion reactions have produced stable high temperatures. In some cases, you can summarize 3 months of data with a single stable temperature difference. There will be some fluctuations of course, but pretty much a flat line. Since we know that cold fusion can do this, there is no reason to think Rossi's version of cold fusion cannot. - Jed
