At 05:41 PM 6/17/2011, Rich Murray wrote:
> 3) Has this recent exchange caused by Krivit's visit changed your
opinion at all? Good or bad...
It's made me more sure that there is no excess heat.
Well, Rich, your underpants are showing.
So to speak.
Excess heat in nickel-hydrogen is not terribly surprising, from prior
reports. I heard a lot about it at the LANR Colloquium at MIT last
weekend. The conditions are pretty different. It's obviously a
different reaction than PdD.
Anyone who is sure that there is no excess heat is basing that on
theoretical prejudice, I'd bet. That's pseudoskepticism. From theory,
fine to say "unlikely." But being "sure," no, Bad Idea. Cargo Cult
Science. And do remember, I sat with the man who coined that term.
Rich, please consider this: Rossi doesn't have a patent adequate to
protect this, certainly not in the U.S., but it's also possible that
his Italian patent, even, is defective. I heard a patent attorney
comment on the Rossi patent application at MIT. His opinion matched
mine: this patent was either not written by a patent attorney who
knew what he was doing, it was utterly incompetent, or there was no
intention to protect the invention and the patent was filed for other reasons.
Given this, if the effect is real, he would not want to encourage
attempts to independently discover his technique. Indeed, the
question at this point would be why he held the demos at all, and
people who know those involved tell me that the claimed motive, to
please Focardi, was likely real. Rossi really doesn't want to
convince anyone, and could benefit, from a business perspective, from
widespread opinion that he's a complete fake.
We don't normally think this way, normally we think that business
people will want everyone to think they have the hottest product
ever. But this is not an ordinary situation, Rossi has a device that,
if it works, is worth *trillions* of dollars. Yet it's only worth
that to him if he gains patent protection, and without some kind of
truly killer demonstration -- not just something that convinces a few
scientists who observe it -- he probably can't get the patent. Or he
may not believe he can get the patent.
And there are some severe patent problems, aside from the U.S. PTO
refusal to consider cold fusion patents.
The point is that Rossi is playing a very complex and difficult game,
and he's going his own way. We should know, soon enough.
That Defkalion press conference should be interesting!
