We all know that Rossi has some personal credibility problems. He has been involved in some dodgy business. As I have pointed out before you can say that about many important people such as Edison and Steve Jobs who got his start selling devices to steal from the telephone company. People are complicated and you should not have a one-dimensional view of their worth.
Lost in the middle of another large thread, Jones Beene listed some reasons why Rossi does have some personal credibility. Let me copy his entire message and then add some other reasons. QUOTE . . . AR sold his biofuel company EON for about one million Euro and could have retired comfortably to Miami on that income. This is a matter of public record. Instead - he reinvests the proceeds of the EON sale into his project ! Does that sound like a scammer? It is preposterous that anyone would claim that he does this sale of a profitable company – and then reinvestment the proceeds to perpetuate as scam, with which to obtain enough capital for “adequate living” when he already had that to begin with. Instead he has to go through the constant reminders of his past legal difficulties, in order to find a solution to one of societies greatest problems? Get a life! These people like Krivit, etc -- who blindly suggest scam because they personally were not honored with a demo -- ought to at least do their homework first and read what is available in the public record before spouting crap about scam, since there is no plausible motive which would be worth the risk. END QUOTE Right! Here are some other reasons -- People who have worked with Rossi tell me that he works 10 to 14 hours a day. As Beene says, he could have retired comfortably but instead he spends hours a day doing difficult, painstaking and sometimes dangerous experiments in a crowded workshop. People who know him tell me he is a genius at the workbench. He has the kind of intellect that expresses itself in prototype machinery, not abstract ideas. This in no way denigrates his abilities. Some people express ideas in words and formulas, others by making equipment. I think Edison mainly worked by building actual prototypes. You might also compare Rossi to a great artist such as Rodin. Independent observers tell me that he really did make dozens of prototype devices for his 1 MW reactor, which he then modified and modified again. I think he scrapped a large number of them at one point, and started over from scratch. This must have cost a fortune. This is not the profile of a scammer. If the equipment was fake, he could produce it quickly with minimal effort. He would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making prototype equipment which he then trashes. He would make one or two fake, stage-prop prototypes, and he would use them again and again. He would not spend thousands of dollars renting a large workshop, renting a gasoline powered 200 kW generator, or buying a shipping container. You can make a fake energy device much smaller than this, at a tiny fraction of this cost. Putting hundreds of devices inside a shipping container does not enhance your credibility with scientists and investors. On the contrary, most people find that odd. A scammer would not invite important people from NASA to his lab and then do a demonstration that clearly fails to work. If he has the ability to put on a demonstration that fools people and fools instruments, why wouldn't he use that ability every time, for every audience? The people from NASA are experts, but no more capable than others who saw the equipment when it was working properly. There is no question that in other demonstrations the performance was quite different from the failed demonstration that day. I cannot prove by logic and common sense that Rossi is not a faker. This sort of thing cannot be demonstrated with rigorous proof, the way an experiment or an equation can be. But everything I know about history, society, confidence men, and my experience with people like Rossi tell me that he is not faking. He does have a powerful reality distortion field. Some gifted people do, especially inventors and entrepreneurs such as Edison and Steve Jobs. I define this as someone who sees things in his imagination more clearly than he sees things in reality, and who has a strange charisma that sometimes causes other people share his visions. Such people are dangerous. They often cause disasters. But they also build things that most people think are impossible, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the airplane. Fleischmann and Pons were nothing like this, by the way. They were painfully conventional people, as Martin often said. - Jed
