On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 6:16 AM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
Ø EW: There is no need to presume that there was any fraud involved… > > > > Wrong. Given the circumstance, fraud is the most logical conclusion based > on the facts. Your stance is similar to saying that OJ was innocent because > the glove didn’t fit. In fact, the case for OJ being innocent is more > defensible than for AR not being deceitful. > Misdirection and fraud are different things. For there to be fraud, there has to have been someone who's been defrauded. I'm not a lawyer, but I assume that only if someone put money on the table with the expectation that the 62Ni amount meant anything has there been a basis for fraud. In addition, there would have to have been a claim by Rossi, directly to that person, that the 62Ni amount was meaningful, made by Rossi contrary to his own understanding of the situation, and upon which the exchange of money was contingent. Do you disagree? Misdirection is a different thing from fraud. It is frustrating to contemplate the possibility in Rossi's case in connection with the Lugano test, for we all are itching to know what's going on. But I do not put misdirection in the same category as fraud. We have long suspected Rossi of misdirection, and to learn later on that this has actually happened on one or more occasions would surprise few observers. I do not trust Parkhamov's reports at this point and would like to see his results successfully replicated. For me this makes his results only suggestive and calls into question the significance of his isotopic analysis. I am also very curious as to why his starting amount of 64Ni was so far above the natural abundance, as you and others have already commented on. I also do not put much faith in readjustments of the Lugano COP. For me, the Lugano heat balance was irreparably inconclusive, given the lack of a proper calibration. There are people apart from Bob Higgins who have great confidence that there effectively was no excess heat; I think they ignore the problem of a lack of calibration at the cost of misplaced confidence in their understanding of the situation. Another difficulty I have is that there are other plausible explanations than misdirection for why there was such a big shift in the amounts of nickel isotopes, even assuming that Rossi intentionally made use of it. Bob Higgins has brought up one: Rossi's fuel might have consisted of a heterogeneous mix of particles of normal nickel and ones of isotopically enriched nickel. When the fuel was sampled, an enriched particle was collected, and when the ash was sampled, a non-enriched particle was collected. In other words, the fuel and ash samples were not representative. This might have been intended as misdirection, but another possibility is that Rossi was under the impression, possibly mistaken, that 62Ni did something to help along the reaction. In other words, I don't think there is a need to presume that fraud involved. Eric
