The speculation is pretty reasonable. While I
prefer to leave all the cards on the table until
we know more, I'll say that the behavior of Rossi
and DGT has been consistent with a hypothesis
that Rossi did see some kind of major heat
effect, and maybe even had some cells -- or a
single cell -- show long-term heat.
Do people here know that Pons and Fleischmann
were seeing 100% of their cells showing excess
heat at the time that they announced? That they
had this success until they ran out of the
original batch of palladium; they had not even
suspected that the effect might be batch
sensitive, *so they didn't even keep any of the
original material.* The rest is history....
Rossi is optimistic about his own ability to
solve problems. But reliability has *always* been
the largest problem with cold fusion/LENR. It
appears that when a reaction finally works, it
tends to poison itself, devices may work for
hours or days, generating amazing levels of heat,
then they stop working. Other setups seemingly
the same don't work, or don't work nearly as well.
Rossi would not be the first inventor to
exaggerate reliability and perhaps to fudge some
results, all in a good cause. After all, he'll
have the problems solved by next week, next month, next year....
This is consistent with Rossi lowering his
announced COP, and also with his focus on
delivering large units, consisting of many small
ones. It is one thing if half the units in a
megawatt assembly aren't working, but the ones
that work provide enough power to meet minimum
specifications, and quite another to sell many
individual units, and many of them don't work or stop working quickly.
(And the megawatt unit might work on delivery, but then ....)
Applying this to DGT, we may speculate that they
did see sufficient evidence to be certain that
there is a heat effect. "But, folks, we have a few details to work out ... "
Details that large numbers of people have worked
on for twenty years without success adequate for a commercial product.
Okay, NiH work wasn't previously the subject of
such intense investigation, and many people, I
think, doubted that NiH even worked. It probably
does, but that's not at all the end of the question!
At 01:02 AM 7/19/2012, MarkI-ZeroPoint wrote:
The following is all speculation, but I think
its pretty clear what when down
