Peter Gluck <peter.gl...@gmail.com> wrote: I am an engineer have 40 years practice in chemical industry and I was > professor of Management of Technology for 3 years in a school of > Ecomanagement for directors, managers. Therefore I am not ready to believe > such an statement . . .
That's good. A person with years of practical experience should not believe those statements. You should also refrain from dismissing those statements. It is a mistake to dismiss a claim made by a person who has demonstrated a 130 kW a cold fusion reactor. Assuming the claim is real, that person has one of the most original and astounding intellects in history, so you should take him seriously. Just withhold judgement and wait to see how things pan out. Put the "minimum 2.5 kW" assertion into a list of things you do not believe yet, but you take into consideration when pondering the nature of the device. By the way, a couple of people off line have suggested to me that Rossi may not be such a genius. He may be "just lucky." He is a tinkerer who happened to twist the knobs the right way. People used to say that about Edison. I disagree. There are far too many permutations for that to be the case. Think about how many potential catalyst materials exist, and how many elements and combinations of elements you might add as dopants, in varying quantities. Think about the range of temperatures you might select, and the various ways to operate the machine. If Rossi was merely twisting dials, he could keep doing that for hundreds of years and never hit the right combination. This is like randomly selecting chess moves and expecting to win against a Grandmaster (nature, hiding her secrets). He might stumble over a way to improve an important parameter, such as power density. But he could not go on devise a machine that has high power density, stability, controllability and the other parameters he has mastered. He has mastered these things, make no mistake. He is as far ahead of the competition as the Wright Brothers were in 1904. To get a sense of what he has done, think of how difficult it has been for for brilliant people such as Storms, McKubre and Fleischmann to improve these parameters one at a time, by inches. Rossi has various theories and models he depends on. Perhaps these theories are invalid. Perhaps they will turn out to be preposterous. In that case, he is relying on fine-tuned observational abilities and an intuitive sense about what to do next to enhance the reaction. That is also a kind of genius. It is the genius of an artist or master artisan. It is what led ancient people to invent things like Damascus steel, which defied the understanding of modern metallurgists until recently. It transformed the world many times before modern science began. There is no reason to think it has lost its power now. We should have as much awe for this mode of discovery as we have for the more modern, rational modes. If it turns out Rossi has no valid science-based idea how he accomplished this, that will not detract from his achievement. On the contrary, it makes it even more astounding. - Jed
