At 12:23 AM 12/17/2009, you wrote:
On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> They are charging for getting a look at the technology, and, I'm
> sure, this comes with heavy NDAs,
Hey. Is "charging to get a look at technology" a dead givaway for an FE
con game? In other words, what other companies let individuals get a look
at unreleased technology, require NDAs, and charge a hefty fee? Note
well: individuals, not interested companies. And NDAs or swearing to
secrecy, not simply buying a special videotape or whatever. What
businesses make money by getting a few thousand people to pay a ?couple
hundred? bucks each in order to sign NDAs and be privy to secret
information?
Scammers. Big red warning flag.
He said it. I said it. Quite a few of us have said it. And this is a
list where wild ideas get some serious hearing. But there isn't any
idea here that hasn't already been covered over and over.
MLM marketers. More weasels.
So, who else? Has *any* legit company ever done this?
You can justify NDAs, and they'd need to build a base of people who
have seen the technology, thoroughly enough to overcome the obvious
theoretical objections, but ... you wouldn't charge them, and you
wouldn't pay them, you'd allow them and encourage them. You might
well restrict this to people who could be trusted to follow an NDA,
or who'd have assets that could be touched if they violate it. That
all makes sense. But the fees don't make sense. Disclosure would be
one package, it need not be individually designed, there would not
necessarily be any hand-holding. What if the NDA got you a simple kit
design? That worked, that could then be studied, a demonstration of
the alleged effect. I would not have to be over unity to the extent
that it continues to run with power output, but it would show that
there is excess energy in the system, in ways that demonstrate a
clear anomaly, at least. Where there is an anomaly, there is
something to learn.
But there is no reason to believe that there is any anomaly at all
here, no reason to believe that any demonstrations done so far have
been adequately studied to rule out even the most obvious objections.
(Like the behavior of batteries when pulse-charged.)
You know, if I were in Dublin, I'd go look at the thing. They've made
it all that interesting. But it's not any science they have that is
interesting, it's the effing human engineering, the province of
marketing professionals and scam artists, there is an interplay
between those two categories.
(Legitimate sales matches products to customers who need them, and
scams -- even legal ones -- sell products to customers who don't need them.)
I'm being quite committed on Steorn, taking a very public position
that this is not a real breakthrough, that the publicity is
essentially lies, not even justified by self-deception. (It's
possible that Steorn began with a sincere belief in a new theory, but
that path can lead to traps and pitfalls, we've read this story many
times. How often has a would-be inventor of some free energy device,
after some serious investment, come out and said, "Oops! I was wrong,
I overlooked this factor!" Yet it has certainly happened many times.
The Men in Black are invoked. There are real Men in Black. And if
they wanted to know what was happening with Steorn, they'd know, all
the NDAs and smokescreen -- Steorn has acknowledged releasing
misleading information to protect themselves from what they
considered premature disclosure -- would not protect them. The Men in
Black, by definition, have huge resources behind them. They could buy
and sell companies like Steorn, several before breakfast. They could
bribe engineers under NDA, or, alternatively, threaten them, but
people don't like to be threatened and it's much cheaper, overall, to
pay them off, if you have the money. The Men in Black are simply one
more red herring, a variant, useful for them, on They Will Try to
Kill This Technology.
And there are those who fall for this. The Cold Fusion field is
afflicted with paranoia about these Dark Forces. There are true
repressive forces, there are enemies of truth, but there are also
limits on all these. Rarely are they the real enemy, the real
problem. The CF field was diverted by the Injustice Of It All.
Instead of focusing on brass tacks, on nailing down the real
difficulties, the reasons why skepticism was legitimately
appropriate, instead of firming up and making solid what was already
discovered and known, which takes disinterested research -- that's
why replications are done by grad students and academics, you can't
patent a replication! -- the field was, for better or worse, diverted
prematurely into search for commercial levels of effect. That may
indeed take what Fleischmann claimed: a Manhattan Project-scale
effort. And until the science is clearly known and accepted at least
as a demonstrated anomaly, beyond artifact, that scale of effort is impossible.
With the real Manhattan project, the science was reasonably
well-known and all that was needed was engineering.
So what's needed with Cold Fusion? The first step is a common and
easy replication, something that can be reliably repeated. If I'm
right, codeposition, under conditions which have been characterized
by SPAWAR, is repeatable. With a gold cathode substrate, I should be
able to detect some radiation. Simple. Cheap. Replicable. If it isn't
fully reliable, but is still produces statistically significant
results, then there is an obvious path for researchers interested in
the pure science of it to follow, at budgetary levels within what can
be handled for pure science with no expected commercial payoff. There
is something very specific to study. That can be improved, indeed, I
assume, but that information can be shared and a whole community can
explore a common object.
The effect seen in these kits doesn't need to be large, it merely
needs to be significant, not explainable without a nuclear reaction.
In the other direction, if it produces an appearance of a nuclear
reaction, and then someone shows that this appearance is deceptive,
by performing certain tests that others can repeat, it's possible
that we will have resolved at least some of the scientific
controversy in the other direction: a non-nuclear explanation. My
business does not depend on the outcome, I'm selling pure scientific
investigation, designed to allow amateurs and professionals to
explore this, to expand the base of people who have seen the effects.
And with that expansion, discovery will ensure, I'm quite sure. Many
approaches are out of reach of amateurs; it's difficult to imagine an
amateur replicating Iwamura, for example. I'm to the point in my
design where I am comfortable predicting that if you have a power
supply and can measure current, you'll be able to produce neutron
signals and detect them with SSNTDs, and the whole cost, including
the SSNTDs, for a single cell, will be around $100. Run a control
light water cell, with the same current (simply takes twice the
voltage) and including developing the SSNTDs, perhaps as an offered
service, under $200.
I predict that this will help continue the sea change that became
visible with the 2004 DoE report, for those who look carefully. It
may or may not find some new science.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when I start
advertising kits. That's not going to happen for some time, I'll need
to see independent replications using the kits before general
advertising (to the amateur science market, perhaps) will begin. I
have to bootstrap this, I don't have significant funding support,
though a little help has appeared, spontaneously offered. When kits
are available and I have myself tested them, donors, if they want to,
will be able to subsidize kit costs according to standards they set.
It's not an essential part of the program, though.
I'm definitely aiming to make a profit, based on my belief, developed
through study of the literature, beginning as a skeptic, that the
science is real. I'll be selling science, not Free Energy. Science
doesn't care about whether energy is "free" or not. It cares about
reality, period, and it cares about reality much more than any theory
or vested interest or opinion. Because I'll be selling science, not
Cold Fusion, as such, I'll be okay even if somehow these kits expose
as artifact some segment of the CF body of research. I'll get my
investment back, and so will anyone who has helped.
Tell me, suppose these kits show that the SPAWAR results are
artifact? If you are involved in the field, would you be interested
in checking that out if you could do so easily and, compared to
standard costs in this field, cheaply? Some would be, and I'll
continue to sell a few kits. Many of my materials are expensive
commodities, they can be sold for more than I paid for them.
Now, what would Steorn think about an independent company that would
make Orbo toys? A little device that makes something rotate longer
than it would seem it should? Something a kid could use in a science
fair project? The kits would be made and sold at a profit, and Steorn
would get royalties at a fair percentage. The toy would demonstrate
the effect they have allegedly discovered.
Let me guess. "No, we don't want to do that, this is Serious
Business, not about toys. Go away."
