Jones Beene wrote: "A good magic show can fool a few journalists and grad students and yes, Levi does not inspire confidence - but take a closer look at the "guests"."
That misses one (the) major point about magic shows. When you go to Las Vegas or Moscow to see a magician make a white tiger disappear, you know its fake. Everybody in the audience knows its just a trick - even the journalists. They all wonder how its done but nobody believes the tiger really disappeared. Its just an illusion. Now consider the same setup - only this time some serious scientists have claimed to have invented a substance that makes objects disappear some twenty odd years before. Since then there has been great controversy about it. And while most of the scientific community has come round to not believing a word of it, a relatively small fraction of them ponders on, experimenting, reporting results (though none of them has ever seen more than a vague glimmer of fading opacity) and feels in general that "there is something - if only we could nail what it is". Now the same magician performs the same trick but he calls himself "Doctor" of some kind, performs his tricks in an old shipping container rather than a circus and has even built a cute little theory about how his wonder works. He can't really explain it because its all jumbled together from previous work done by others - but he doesn't have to. Whenever it gets inconsistent, he just shows a secretive face and claims he really HAS found what everybody else couldn't - only he unfortunately can't tell them (for apparent reasons). When he performs his trick with the disappearing tiger, they will ALL believe it - PhD or not. And the same is true for Rossi and people he invites to his demos. They believe it because they want to. They believe it because they are scientists interested (and probably "believing") in cold fusion and not police officers from an anti fraud unit or con artists or magicians who would know what to suspect and what to look out for. Claiming their word is any kind of proof or even encouragement is ridiculous. Send Bob Park or Lubos Motl to one of Rossi's demos - and see what they say.
