Someone asked me what I mean by "independent evaluations of the claims." I mean that outside experts plan to go into the lab and observe the experiments, the way Rob Duncan looked at Energetics Technologies. I do not think they intend to do an independent replication.
Anyway, if they do this, and give me a report, I will publish it immediately. It is supposed to come in 2 or 3 months. I do not expect a delay, but I have seen situations in which a report is delayed repeatedly without explanation until it fades away. If that happens I will eventually conclude that someone made a mistake. My impression is that Rossi is honest and doing the best he can, but he has difficulty communicating in English. The experts are native speakers of English, so we can expect a clearer description. It may seem odd that a language problem can cloud a scientific presentation, but I have attended cold fusion conferences in Japan in which researchers presented clear, precise, right-to-the-point presentations of their work in Japanese, whereas in English they come across as confused and inconclusive. As I said, I empathize! Heck, I get tongue-tied in English. On the few occasions I have presented in Japanese, I was nervous as a cat. Now that we have e-mail and web sites, I think scientists should write more and lecture less. I can write in Japanese as clearly as I can in English. It just takes longer. It is easier than lecturing. You can have a native speaker correct the mistakes before you upload the report. - Jed
