On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 8:26 AM, blaze spinnaker <[email protected]>wrote:
Because the implications, if the AHE report is accurate, are overwhelming. > And while it will be net positive, there will be massive creative > destruction that will occur if the eCat is real. ... So to idly discuss > these claims without proper verification is very careless. > About the implications, it is no doubt true that they are likely to be significant. And at an intuitive level one wants to do additional due diligence in that case to verify that what one seems to be seeing is actually true. But I think this kind of wariness of allowing oneself to be taken for a fool can also lead to weird outcomes when taken to an extreme. I have seen it lead people to make demands that are impossible to meet, to ignore perceived business imperatives in the absence of IP protection, to cast aspersions on Rossi without a basis for doing so and, more generally, in contexts apart from Rossi, for allowing or encouraging a derailing of the scientific process. The implications may be profound, but we should not lose sight of the fact that in the end what we are talking about are heat measurements. This is something that people do every day around the world in connection with various engineering projects. It is not rocket or nuclear science. It's estimating how much heat is coming off of an object over time. So despite the implications, we should not succumb to magical thinking as a result of them. In the present situation, we can use lateral thinking to come up with any number of explanations for the apparent power output that Levi and the Swedish scientists saw, but an important question is, given what we know, which of those explanations is the most plausible? Vocal critics, in their sense that something is amiss, seem to forget that last step and become fixated on scenarios involving magic tricks that, five years from now, when they have a little more perspective, they will probably be able to appreciate as being a somewhat far-fetched. Eric
