At 04:01 PM 4/14/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
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).
Rossi claims to have tried *many* combinations. And he might have
been both persistent and lucky. Remove either, it's possible, and
he'd not have found anything.
Or he really did nail it by how he approached the work. We simply
don't know yet.
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.
They were working with the palladium deuteride system, and it's
possible that this is an intrinsically limited approach.
For the science, PdD was very interesting. But, with my excellent
hindsight, much more effort should have been put into following up on
the nickel-hydrogen system. Certainly there were clues.
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.
It would lead to "lucky" as an important factor. But without the
effort he put in, no amount of luck would have accomplished what he
did -- assuming that it's real. (And, yes, Jed, it's looking real,
more real with every development.)
The hypothesis that Beene put forward of a fraudulent "enhancement"
is not utterly implausible, inventors have previously, needing to
make a spectacular demonstration, often to raise funds to "complete"
their work, in which they believed, set up a fraud, and scientists
have been known to fake results, believing that, in the end, it
wouldn't matter, since they were announcing something real. They thought. Oops!
But is fraud likely? In a word, no.
