On Aug 25, 2011, at 9:14 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Brief public demos have been repeated 4 times in 8 months, I think.
That is a small number. Anyone would invest in this based on those
demos would be insane, in my opinion.
I am glad we agree on at least some aspect of this.
On Aug 25, 2011, at 9:56 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Daniel Rocha <danieldi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Pretty much the total destruction of all confidence I have in LENR.
If so many competent people in the field were cheated that easily
by Rossi, I can expect much worse from everyone, even in the sense
of self deception.
Some questions:
How many competent people in the field are convinced by Rossi? How
many stand to be cheated in any sense?
It is not primarily the people competent in this field that stand to
be cheated if Rossi's device is a fraud or self deception. There are
plenty of people with a lot of money who are scientifically
clueless. These are the kind of people that can be suckered in by
scientifically inadequate or even misleading demos.
As far as I know, you can count them on one hand. A lot of people
are paying close attention. Many, including me, think that the
weight of evidence is in favor of the claims, based on previous Ni-
H claims and so on.
You of all people here must know that *belief* based on minimal
evidence is one thing, scientific evidence is another. That is an
entirely different thing. There is abundant evidence that LENR is
real, and that scientific study of it is warranted. There is no
reliable published scientific evidence I know of that demonstrates
LENR is commercially viable at this point, and that goes for Rossi's
device especially. In fact there are various red flags with regard
to both Rossi and his claims. I am sure we all look forward to the
production of a 1 MW reactor. If that does not happen then it will
be very difficult to obtain investors or political support from
legislatures to fund badly needed research. *Everyone* stands to
lose from that. There could even be unnecessary resource wars and
famine because of that.
Some people from outside the field say they are convinced, such as
Levi, and E&K. They have actually performed tests themselves so
they can judge the issue better than most people, and they have
more reason to be convinced. If I had observed the 18-hour test in
person, I would probably be 100% convinced. (I would also have
reported it in much more detail than Levi has done, but that's
another story.)
[snip]
- Jed
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
