My strongest reason for believing that Rossi is on the up and up - plain old faith.
1) QCD, the theory of the strong interaction that controls how protons and neutrons interact, is a beautiful structure that is just about completely useless. Almost nothing can be calculated with it. I don't mean a restricted number of things - I mean just about nothing. Not only is it completely sterile computationally, it is also absolutely useless as a heuristic phenomenology to pave the way forward, the way the London theory of superconductivity paved the way for the "real deal" of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory. 2) Neutrino physics is in complete disarray. The discovery of oscillations and the failure to find the Higgs boson (something many of us thought would never be found years ago) has thrown even the successful part of the standard model, the electroweak sector, into chaos. 3) Even bare QED, the quantum version of electrodynamics, is plagued with mathematical ambiguities that caused both Dirac and Feynman to ultimately reject it. Despite all the hubris about calculations to 8 decimal places, as a theory it is hopelessly flawed by reliance on ambiguous mathematics and poorly defined physical concepts. As Dirac said, one ignore a quantity because it is small, not because it is infinite! In other words, the standard model, for all its publicity, is a ramshackle of phenomenology that "borrowed" shall we say, its main tools from the theory of superconductivity and pushed them way beyond the brink of reasonableness. Even the fundamental idea, gauge invariance, does not last past square 1, and one must sacrifice it to have a short range force. Now consider the situation in 1820, when Faraday was working. Almost nothing was known about the true nature of light, there was no cooperative theory of electricity and magnetism, much less one that united them is a single scheme - that would have to wait until 1865. But Faraday forged ahead with his experiments. He discovered that a current loop in the presence of a magnet experienced a torque - the first clue to their actual relationship. Within a decade, people were making electric motors, completely without any real understanding of what was going on! Yet that did not stop people from tinkering and inventing and moving forward. It was the utility of the phenomenon that drove the science, not the other way around! And of course who in his right mind would have imagined the key to their relationship was nothing but light itself? That had to wait for a epochal genius, Maxwell. Friends, there are no epochal geniuses around. But we do have limited knowledge - a great deal of phenomenology - about the nucleus, and a bandy-legged, cross-eyed theory that at least makes up a sort-of consistent whole. The LENR researchers of today are like Faraday - Rossi is like the guys who made motors (and got rich!) - we wait for the Maxwell to cut the Gordian knot. But for the knot to be cut - you first have to believe it is possible. You have to have faith! Did we really think we would go down into the mud again without ever making any progress? Did we really imagine it was all over? Here's a brand new phenomenon, exactly when one was desperately needed! both in the practical world and in the abstract world of pure research. I could not imagine that we would all just turn out the lights, turn off our computers, shut down our universities and libraries, dismantle their buildings for firewood, and simply return to the dark ages. I had faith that some day, something new would happen. I am painfully aware of my own limitations, but that is exactly why I'm allowed to believe, when the self-satisfied and arrogant skeptic can only stew in his own cynicism. It's faith that tells me, more than 1000 experts and gauges, that this is real. -drl ---------------------------------------------- "I write a little. I erase a lot." - Chopin
