I responded to some of the comments at Mats Lewan's blog: https://matslew.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/comments-on-defkalion-reactor-demo-in-milan/#comment-1097
I have to walk a fine line. I do not want to get dragged into a fight between Defkalion and Mary Yugo. I also do not want anyone to think I endorse Defkalion's claims. They have to publish an independent replication to establish credibility. I cannot judge whether their claims are true, false, or mistaken. It is even remotely possible they are fraudulent, although I doubt that. The video was a helpful guide to their claims. It puts us in a better position to judge an independent evaluation. But until we see that evaluation we must reserve judgement. No one gets a free pass. Nullius in verba. If Defkalion wants people to believe them, they will publish one of their reports now held under NDA. I think it is irresponsible to accuse them of fraud, but it would also be irresponsible to endorse their claims. I wrote in the blog: "In view of the recent tests by Levi et al., and some unpublished previous tests, I think it is extremely unlikely that Rossi is engaged in fraud. I regard the Levi report as independent verification. I have not seen a similar independent verification of Defkalion’s claims so I cannot judge their credibility. Obviously I cannot endorse their claims either." On the other hand, there is no harm in speculating about the theoretical or engineering aspects of Defkalion's claims, on the assumption that the claims are true. When an interesting new experiment is published we glom onto it. We try to figure out how it fits into the big picture of cold fusion. We do this even though we know that many results turn out to be mistaken. I am still not sure about Celani's wire claims, especially after the MFMP and others made heroic attempts to replicate with no clear results. If that turns out to be a mistake, oy veh! Too bad! That will mean we have wasted our time speculating about the theoretical or practical uses of wire, and the MFMP has wasted months of effort and a ton of money. Them's the breaks. If you don't like that, do not get involved in cutting-edge scientific research. We would have to forgive Celani if it turns out to be a mistake. Fraud would infuriating and unforgivable. But they are functionally similar in many ways. I do not think many people outside of Defkalion have invested much effort or time evaluating their results, or speculating about the theoretical implications. Until the demo we have not had much to speculate about. People have spent a lot of effort looking at Rossi's results. This has been fruitful. - Jed
