The moment of truth has already passed

Mats Lewan continues to believe, long after the frauds of Andrea Rossi became crystal clear. From his blog, An Impossible Invention:

The moment of truth is getting close with launch on January 31st

“An Impossible Invention” is the title of Lewan’s book about Rossi and the “E-cat.” The reference is to the alleged impossibility of a device, an “energy catalyzer,” to generate heat from nickel and hydrogen. Lewan, a science journalist originally, was right, my opinion, to treat the “invention” as “possible,” not “impossible.” However, the problem isn’t impossibility, it is that Rossi was shown, by incontrovertible evidence in the trial, Rossi v. Darden, to have lied repeatedly. Case guide. 

On January 31, 2019, inventor and entrepreneur Andrea Rossi will hold an online presentation on the commercial launch of his heating device, the E-Cat. Thereby, the moment of truth is approaching for the carbon free, clean, abundant, cheap, and compact energy source that could potentially replace coal, oil, gas, and nuclear, and also solve the global climate crisis.

This is fluff. The moment of truth passed long ago. Rossi claimed to have a 1 MW reactor ready for sale before the end of 2011. That reactor was actually purchased by Industrial Heat, for $1.5 million, and delivered in 2013. With that, and a payment of $10 million, Rossi also agreed to disclose whatever was needed to build the reactors, and to license the technology to Industrial heat, for regions covering half the planet. In addition, subject to a “guaranteed performance test,” IH was to pay Rossi $89 million more. Rossi remained free to market or use the technology independently in the other half of the world.

It appears that Lewan has refused or failed to read the evidence from that trial, consisting of documents, almost entirely unchallenged, plus depositions under oath. We can assume that the unchallenged evidence is authentic, there are detailed responses from both sides, in motions to dismiss and answers to those.

The trial began, the jury was seated, and opening arguments were made. It was obvious to me how this was going to go. Rossi’s claim for $89 million was going to be rejected, for many reasons, IH was not going to be able to recover their investment paid to Rossi (because of estoppel), but IH would be able to claim fraud from the “Doral test,” and be able to collect damages from Rossi and those who assisted him perpetrate the fraud.

Obviously, Lewan could dispute that, but not reasonably unless he actually looks at the evidence, evidence that I studied and documented intensely, in order to make it available.

Since I started reporting on Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat technology in 2011, he always told me that his main goal, and the only thing that would convince people about the controversial physical phenomenon it was built on, would be to put a working product on the market.

What is truly odd about Lewan is that he says this, but actually ignores it. There was an allegedly “working product” on the market in 2011, with a price of $1.5 million, and it was purchased by an eager customer, IH. The guaranteed performance test did not take place in a timely fashion. Rossi blames IH for that, but the evidence shows otherwise, but Rossi then convinced IH to allow the reactor to be installed in Florida for a sale of power to a “customer” he had found, and he argued that an independent customer would be more convincing as a demonstration than what IH had proposed, an installation in North Carolina in a related company.

And Rossi clearly represented that the customer was actually Johnson-Matthey, Rossi’s emails show how he then attempted to create plausible deniability. A jury would have seen right through that. The customer was, in fact, a company set up by Rossi’s attorney, Johnson, who was also the President of Leonardo Technologies, Rossi’s Florida company. There was no “chemical company” other than Rossi’s activity, he controlled it entirely.

But if the reactor worked, so what? At least that is what many on Planet Rossi think. IH claimed that they had been unable to create any success with Rossi reactors, other than what appeared in some tests, later considered to be artifact (such as the Lugano test: IH had made that reactor).

This was the ultimate market test. IH was not about to pay $89 million for a “test” that did not satisfy the terms of the Agreement, but, because, the thinking would go, perhaps Rossi, known to be paranoid, had not disclosed to them the “secret.” So, having paid Rossi $11.5 million (and more in various ways), they would have wanted to keep the license, just in case it turned out to work.

They had four or five lawyers sitting there in the trial in Miami, it was costing them millions of dollars. They might not have been able to recover their legal costs, and there would be other reasons to avoid a trial. They are working to support inventors, and prosecuting a fraud claim against an inventor would not be the kind of publicity they would want.

So when Rossi, having claimed for a year that he was going to wipe the floor with Darden and Industrial Heat, proposed a walk-away, that no money change hands, he gives up his $89 million claim, and they give back the reactors (there were actually two 1 MW plants plus other prototypes), and the license was cancelled, they accepted.

They knew more about the Rossi technology than anyone other than Rossi. They had worked for about three years trying to get it to work. If it worked even modestly well, it would have been worth many billions of dollars, maybe trillions. With that knowledge, instead of spending a few million more, they chose to walk away, and focus on other LENR technology.

To me, this is beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence that Rossi technology was worthless. And the kicker: After the case settled, Rossi had people screaming for a plant, and he had two of them. If the technology actually worked, he could have installed it in a real customer’s facility, or could have sold heat to heating co-ops in Sweden. He’d have been making money hand over fist.

Instead, he dismantled the plants, destroying them, and focused on his “improved product,” which is what the upcoming demo is about.

Now, eight years later, after events taking unexpected and amazing turns which I told in my book An Impossible Invention and in this blog, Rossi claims to be ready to do so. His plan is to sell heat from remotely monitored devices at a price per kWh 20 percent below market price, with no carbon emissions from the operation of the devices.

The book did not cover the revealed information about the IH/Rossi affair. He has mentioned it on the blog, with shallow, very incomplete coverage that gives full voice to Rossi deceptive descriptions. Lewan has become a Rossi shill.

The Doral installation was a sale of power at $1000 per megawatt-day. So he already had, over eight years ago, a plant that could be installed to do what he now “plans” to do. Unless he was lying, then, and if he was lying then, why would we imagine he is not lying now?

(Note: The business model of selling a service rather than a product is a strong megatrend driven by digitalisation and by internet of things, making remote monitoring more effective, and it is already used by e.g. Rolls-Royce and GE, selling flight hours rather than aero engines).

This is basically irrelevant. Software is also licensed, not sold, etc.)

While this already implies a substantial cost-saving for the customers, it is most probably only the start of what the E-Cat technology can provide ahead, if it works as claimed.

There is no news here, only a “plan” which is not binding on anyone. On what basis does Lewan claim “probable.” Yes, he hedges it, “if it works as claimed.” Does he attempt to assess the odds of it working? Would past performance be a way of assessing this? Some who has failed many times to deliver what he promised, how much credence should be placed on new promises, in advance of a independently testable product?

At the online presentation (more info at http://www.ecatskdemo.com) Rossi plans to show a two-hour video of a device already in operation, reportedly heating an industrial premises of about 250 square meters in the US to 25°C since Nov 19, 2018. At the presentation, he will provide details regarding the commercial launch, but here is what I have been told and what I have concluded so far:

We know that what Rossi says is utterly unreliable. Does Lewan know that? Has he looked at the evidence, or does he just run on his gut?

A demonstration like that described can be faked six ways till Sunday. Rossi claimed that the reactor in Florida actually delivered a megawatt for most of the one-year period, based on measurements that he controlled, completely.

The problem was that a megawatt in that warehouse (is this the same “industrial premises”?), given the lack of a powerful heat exchanger, would have made it uninhabitable, fatal to occupants. That was one of the facts to be brought out at trial.

Rossi, last minute, as discovery was closing, contradicting what he had written on his blog for a year, claimed to have made a heat exchanger, didn’t keep receipts or take photographs, and he used the labor of guys who drive around in trucks looking for work, and … it would have had to have been there for the whole year, without anyone visiting noticing it, and it would have been noisy as hell and very visible.

No, he lied again, this time under oath, so that’s why his attorney had little trouble convincing him to settle if he could. He was facing not only losing millions of dollars, but also a possible criminal prosecution for perjury. Rossi was used to lying to the public, which is not necessarily illegal. He was playing a new game in U.S. federal court, where lying is a Very Bad Idea.

Lewan then goes on to give the alleged characteristics of the E-Cat SK. It is all “what he has been told,” and he reports what he was told with no sign of caution or skepticism. Lewan has had enough experience with Rossi to know he can be deceptive. This is my theory: if he were to ask inconvenient questions, he’d lose his access to Rossi. And he’s now made it a business, selling the book, which he is planning to update.

These characteristics are entirely Rossi Says. When we talk about generations of development of devices (Lewan calls the SK the “fourth generation”), it’s assumed that the earlier generations worked and the later generations are improved. If in mercato veritas, what is the truth of the earlier generations?

Bottom line, they were worthless. If they actually worked, they were worth, even as prototypes, at least hundreds of millions of dollars. The market has spoken the truth, but Lewan is ignoring it.

Lately, I have reported little on the E-Cat, simply because there has been essentially no new information that could be confirmed. Also in this case, in theory we will not be able confirm any of the claims presented, specifically since the existing customer will not be disclosed at the presentation on Jan 31, as far as I know.

There was a great deal of information revealed in 2016, in the trial. Lewan ignored it, relying only on what Rossi told him, apparently. Now, we still have no verifiable information. So why would January 31 be the “moment of truth”? Why is Lewan hyping this non-event, where Rossi will just present more smoke and mirrors?

But let’s assume that the there’s no working E-Cat device. Then either Rossi is fooling himself, and there’s nothing that makes me believe this now, or it’s a fraud, which hardly makes any sense at this point.

We already know that Rossi lies and that if the Doral plant worked, it was not working at anything like the level claimed. If it were a weak technology, but working, IH would have held onto it fiercely. They could afford it. (Prepping for the trial, Rossi claimed that IH wasn’t paying because they didn’t have the money to pay, but, in fact, IH had lined up $200 million ($150 million beyond what was already invested in other technology), plenty to pay Rossi and have money for development, but … they were not about to spend that when the frikkin’ reactors didn’t work!

It wasn’t even a weak technology. Before they made the deal with Rossi, they knew Rossi had a checkered past, but they decided they needed to find out. So they found out. It didn’t work.

It also “hardly made any sense” that a fraud would sue their defrauded customer. But he did. Basically, Lewan appears to have no idea how Rossi might actually think and operate, he has ignored the experience of those who worked closely with him for years.

In the fraud case, the E-Cat SK would be an electric heater consuming as much power as it outputs. But after at least a decade of hard work, without asking money from any third party, having earned USD11.5M from his ex US partner Industrial Heat, why would Rossi get back now and sell heat at a loss? To a customer that would immediately discover the fraud by looking at the electricity consumption of the device?

This is absolutely appalling. Rossi asked for and got funding from Ampenergo, so when IH bought the license from Rossi, Ampenergo was part of the deal, signed on, and IH paid Ampenergo millions in addition to what they paid Rossi. And then Rossi not only asked for and received $11.5 million from IH, he was also demanding $89 million. In Doral, there was no customer, but the fake customer agreed to pay $1000 per day for power, and Rossi approved invoice requests for IH to issue for those amounts. IH wasn’t convinced that there was a real power sale; for whatever reason, they didn’t issue those invoices, but the customer had no income, no business, so who would have paid those invoices?

Obviously, Rossi was willing to pay invoices, and it would then have strengthened his case to collect the $89 million. Spending $360,000 to gain $89 million? Lewan has the brain of a cockroach.

(Sorry, cockroaches, you are smarter than that.)

We don’t know anything about the conditions of a power sale. We don’t know how large the container for the reactor is. It must be large enough to protect the reactor from intrusion, and what kind of power source could be inside? We don’t know. This is all speculation, not news. Bottom line, a sale of power could be a fake demonstration of power generation, and, in addition, what if the “customer” is in collusion with Rossi? What would be the goal? Most likely, to gain investment.

Let’s suppose this is a 40 KW reactor.Say that power costs 10 cents/kW-h, that’s $4 per hour, $48 per day if it is 24/7, or under $18,000 per year, if the input power were free. Rossi could easily afford that for a time, and being able to report a satisfied customer — and he could create more than one –, how much more investment could he obtain?

(In this scenario, Rossi could smuggle fuel into the reactor, say propane, which would fuel an ordinary water heater.. So he could have apparent input power far below the heat output. He would be able to charge 80% of the going rate for heat, so, yes, he would be losing money, but not nearly as much as it might seem. Ponzi scheme!)

Clearly, only when at least one customer, having used the heat from the E-Cat SK for some time, will speak publicly about the service, the moment of truth will arrive.

No. There was “one customer” in Florida, apparently an independent company, with a lawyer representing it. In fact, it was a blind trust, in fact, it was not independent, and did not, contrary to the installation agreement with IH, measure the heat delivered independently. Lewan doesn’t think of the possible problems because he has paid no attention to what actually happened in Florida.

I looked above, and Lewan did hedge his claim. The moment of truth is not January 31. It is rather “the moment of truth is getting close with launch on January 31.” Except this is not a “launch.” With a product launch, the product becomes available. Is a product becoming available?

Once again, Rossi claimed an available product, a “1 MW reactor” in 2011. So was that “close to launch”? Lewan is more like “out to lunch.”

Meanwhile, everything else that I have observed and witnessed during these eight years, including my own measurements on the previous E-Cat versions, and the one-year test of a one megawatt plant in Doral, FL, during which Rossi started developing the E-Cat QX with its electronic/electromagnetic control system, indicates that the E-Cat is a working device, although many would call it An Impossible Invention.

About that “one year test” in Florida, it didn’t work, it was fraud. “Impossible Invention” is totally irrelevant. All the prior tests had glaring defects. Lewan was present for the Hydro Fusion test, which failed, and at which Rossi argued that they were not measuring input power correctly. Lewan argued with him, apparently think that this was just an honest mistake. But if Rossi could make that mistake with the Hydro Power test, how about with his own? Again and again, basic problems existed with the tests, never resolved because Rossi kept changing the device operation, so a possible artifact in one test could not be verified (or otherwise) in the next.

This is all obvious to many, many observers, so why not to Lewan?

By the way, I would like to share my impression that the groundbreaking control system of the E-Cat QX and the SK, is the result of a kind of dreamteam consisting of the genius Andrea Rossi, with elusive and creative ideas about physics and about what he thinks could be possible, and of electric engineer and computer scientist Fulvio Fabiani, not only being an expert on electronics but also being capable of interpreting Rossi’s wild and hard-to-grasp ideas, transforming them into real electronic circuits actually performing the job Rossi had in mind.

What a flack! Fabiani played a role in Florida, and I’m not going to go over it, but he was in line to lose substantial sums from his professional incompetence. He destroyed evidence belonging to IH.

I will develop this story further in the updated third edition of my book, which I hope to be able to conclude within a year or so, once the moment of truth has arrived.

And when the moment arrives, the E-Cat technology will most probably start providing clean, cheap, abundant, and sustainable energy to everyone in the world, in combination with solar and wind (which are a long way from replacing fossils on their own, and furthermore also require problematic large scale world-wide chemical battery implementations for energy storage).

Until then, the champagne remains on ice. And when I open it, I will be thinking of Sven Kullander and of late Prof. Sergio Focardi who played a fundamental role, helping Rossi to develop the E-Cat technology.

And Lewan has announced (twice, cancelled twice) a New Energy conference, featuring Rossi technology. He has lost all credibility. Here are his announcements:

UPDATE: The New Energy World Symposium was postponed in March 2017, waiting for an upcoming commercial launch of LENR based power. Read more here.

UPDATE 2: An online presentation regarding commercial launch of LENR based power will be held on January 31, 2019. Please get back to this blog for a report shortly.

I’m happy to announce that registration for the New Energy World Symposium is now open, with an Early Bird discount of EUR195 valid until February 17, 2018.

He knows that January 31 is unlikely to be the “moment of truth.” So why is he plowing ahead? (and this. scheduled for June, 2019, was also postponed indefinitely)

Update

Andrea Rossi today published, on ResearchGate, a “preprint,” E-Cat SK and long range particle interactions. This is a theoretical paper standing on unverifiable experimental results, but it does disclose some data not seen before.  The paper begins:

The E-Cat technology poses a serious and interesting challenge to the conceptual foundations of modern physics.

There is no challenge until there are confirmed experimental results. Previous reports of SK performance were based entirely on RossiSays, with no verification allowed of necessary measurements. The device demonstrated in Stockholm was periodically stimulated with a high voltage, which would strike a plasma, which would then have low resistance. That strike would be relatively high voltage and would input power into the system. No measurements were allowed of the full input power, or, in fact, even of operating power, i.e., both the voltage and current in steady state operation.

This paper gives this description:

5 Experimental Setup

The plausibility of these hypotheses is supported by a series of experiments made with the E-cat SK. The E-cat SK has been put in a position to allow the eye of a spectrometer view exactly the plasma in a dark room: an ohm-meter has measured the resistance across the circuit that gives energy to the E-Cat; the control panel has been connected with an outlet with 220 V , while from the control panel departed the two cables connected with the plasma electrodes; a frequency meter, a laser and a tesla-meter have been connected with the plasma for auxiliary measurements; a Van der Graaf electron accelerator (200 kV ) has been used for the examination of the plasma electric charge. Other instruments used in the experimental
setup: a voltage generator/modulator; two oscilloscopes, one for the power source and one for monitoring the energy consumed by the E-Cat; Omega thermocouples to measure the delta T of the cooling air; IR thermometer; a frequency generator.

There are no useful details in this. What was the experimental procedure? In what is a plasma created? How is the plasma created? “Energy consumed” is a standard Rossi trope. Energy is not consumed, unless there is an endothermic reaction, we could then use that language.

The voltage across the device is given as 0.25 volt and the current 3.2 mA. He claims a resistance of 75 ohms. Previously he claimed that the operating resistance was zero. 3.2 mA might maintain a plasma, but would not strike it. Periodically, in the Stockholm demonstration, there was a zapping sound and a flash of light. He was striking the plasma, which would take a far higher voltage. There is no mention of striking a plasma in the paper.

In any case, no confirmed experimental results, no challenge.

 

Right and wrong at the same time

may be subject to copyright

The cold fusion horizon

Is cold fusion truly impossible, or is it just that no respectable scientist can risk their reputation working on it? — Huw Price

I’ve been reading about Synthestech, blogged about it, and now Deneum, more of the SOS, but a step up in professional hype.

Steve Krivit was right about Rossi, he was — and remains — , ah, how shall I express it? The technical phrase is “liar, liar, pants on fire.” But Krivit’s evidence was weak on the subject, mostly raising obvious suspicions, and Tom Darden and  his friends knew that they needed much better evidence, which they proceeded to obtain.

They found quite enough to conclude that if Rossi had anything, it was so certainly useless and so buried in piles of deceptions and misleading information that they simply walked away, it wasn’t worth the cost of completing the trial in Rossi v. Darden in order to keep the rights, which they could rather easily have done.

Krivit was “right,” certainly in a way, but his claims were obvious, in fact. He was right to report what he found, but it was misleading, and useless, to label everything with approbation and contempt, the habits of yellow journalism.

It is not clear that Industrial Heat could have avoided the cost of their expedition. What I find remarkable is how few have learned anything from the affair, and some of those who clearly have learned, have learned how to better extract money from a shallow, knee-jerk public.

The post today is inspired by a photo I found on the Deneum twitter feed. I will be writing about Deneum, there is a real scientist behind Deneum, but is there real science as well? That’s unclear, but what is very clear is the level of hype, that Deneum is representing itself in ways that will lead a casual reader to imagine they already have a product and merely need to start manufacturing it. So $100 million, please. Here is where to send it.

It’s a rich topic for commentary, but today, I’m following some breadcrumbs found, a blogger who was right and wrong, in a different way, more or less from the other side. The photo above, and the headline is from a post by Huw Price, 21 December, 2015

That date is important. At that point, Thomas Darden had been interviewed at ICCF-19, and had made some positive noises. By that time, Darden knew that something was very off about Rossi, and some — or all — of his positivity may have been about technology other than Rossi’s. At the time, I noticed how vague it was. In early 2016, Rossi claimed to have completed the “Guaranteed Performance Test” and was billing Industrial Heat for $89 million. And it was all a scam, a tissue of lies and deceptions. So, now, because of the lawsuit Rossi filed,  we know, to a reasonable degree of certainty, how the Rossi affair worked and did not work. How does Dr. Price’s essay look in hindsight, and has he ever commented?

I’m using hypothesis.is to comment on that essay, because I don’t want to pay $500 to syndicate it, though it is an excellent essay, in the general principles brought out. I may also, later, copy some excerpts here.

The annotations

. (To see them, one must install a tool from hypothes.is, which I highly recommend. Hypothes.is is not intrusive. To start.)

Having written that, I now find that Huw Price also blogged this himself, as

My Dinner with Andrea. Cute title.

A few months later, Huw Price wrote another essay for Aeon:

Is the cold fusion egg about to hatch?

His speculations were off. Has he followed up?

I’ve been unable to find anything, so far. Will the real Huw Price please stand up?

 

 

 

 

Impressive, eh? How could that be a scam?

But it was. So how was

The Russians stole the fuel!

On the private CMNS list, there was a post referring to an incident in which Andrea Rossi allegedly claimed that the fuel from a  dummy reactor (deliberately made with no fuel, but which had become confused with fueled reactors), which had shown the same apparent excess heat as the fueled reactors.
I realized that I had never covered in depth the implications of this event. The account is from a deposition of Thomas Darden.

Continue reading “The Russians stole the fuel!”

Fake facts and true lies

This a little “relax after getting home” exploration of a corner of Planet Rossi, involving Mats Lewan — but, it turns out, only very peripherally –, Frank Acland’s interview of Andrea Rossi just the other day (June 11), and some random comments on E-Cat World, easily categorized under the time-wasting “Someone is wrong on the internet.” Continue reading “Fake facts and true lies”

Podcast with Ruby Carat

Yay Ruby!

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax on the Cold Fusion Now! podcast

She interviews me about the lawsuit, Rossi v. Darden. Reminds me I need to organize all that information, but the Docket is here.

Wikipedians, that is all primary source (legal documents), so it can only be used with editorial consensus, for bare and attributed fact, if at all. There is very little usable secondary reliable source on this. Law360 (several articles) and the Triangle Business Journal (several articles) are about it. Although this was an $89 million lawsuit (plus triple damages!), I was the only journalist there, other than one day for a woman from Law360. Wikipedia is still trying to figure out what “walked away” means.

(As to anything of value, it means that both parties walked away. But IH also returned all intellectual property to Rossi, and returned all reactors — including those they built — to him.)

The agreement was released by Rossi, but the only source for it is from Mats Lewan’s blog. Mats was a journalist, and his original employer was Wikipedia “reliable source” — a term of art there –, but … he’s not, just as I am not. Mats Lewan is still holding on to the Dream.

I was and have been open to the possibility that Rossi was involved in fraud and conspiracy. But during the discovery phase of the litigation, it became obvious that the defense couldn’t produce any convincing evidence for this hypothesis. All technical arguments that were put forward were hollow and easily torn apart by people with engineering training.

It became obvious during the legal proceedings that Lewan was not following them and did not understand them. There were many circumstantial evidences where some kind of fraud is the only likely explanation, and then there were other clear and deliberate deceptions. There was about zero chance that Rossi would have been able to convince a jury that the Agreement had been followed and the $89 million was due. There was even less chance that he’d have been able to penetrate the corporate veil by showing personal fraud, which is what he was claiming. No evidence of fraud on the part of IH appeared, none. It was all Rossi Says.

Lewan thinks the problem was an engineering one. Lewan stated this in his later report on the QX test in Stockholm, November 24, 2017, about certain possible problems.

Clearly this comes down to a question of trust, and personally, discussing this detail with Rossi for some time, I have come to the conclusion that his explanation is reasonable and trustworthy.

Rossi is quite good at coming up with “explanations” of this and that, he’s been doing it for years, but the reality is that the test he is describing had major and obvious shortcomings, essentially demonstrating nothing but a complicated appearance. Rossi has always done that. The biggest problem is that, as Lewan has realized, there is high-voltage triggering necessary to strike a plasma, and there no measure of the power input during the triggers, and from the sound, they were frequent. Lewan readily accepts ad-hoc excuses for not measuring critical values.

What I notice about Lewan’s statement is the psychology. It is him alone in discussion with Rossi, and Rossi overwhelms, personally. Anyone who is not overwhelmed (or who, at least, suspends or hides skeptical questioning) will be excluded. Lewan has not, to my knowledge, engaged in serious discussions with those who are reasonably skeptical about Rossi’s claims. He actually shut that process down, as he notes (disabling comments on his blog).

The Doral test, the basis for the Rossi claim, was even worse. Because of, again, major deficiencies in the test setup, and Rossi disallowance of close expert inspection during the test — even though IH owned the plant and IP already — it was impossible to determine accurately the power output, but from the “room calorimeter” — the temperature rise in the warehouse from the release of heat energy inside it –, the power could not have been more than a fraction of what he was claiming. And Rossi lied about this, in the post-trial Lewan interview, and Lewan does not seriously question him, doesn’t confront preposterous explanations. Lewan goes on:

However, as I stated above, if I were an investor considering to invest in this technology, I would require further private tests being made with accurate measurements made by third-party experts, specifically regarding the electrical input power, making such tests in a way that these experts would consider to be relevant.

Remember, IH had full opportunity for “private tests,” for about four years. Lewan has rather obviously not read the depositions. Understandably, they are long! After putting perhaps $20 million into the project, plus legal expenses (surely several million dollars), IH chose to walk away from a license which, if the technology could be made to work, even at a fraction of the claimed output, could be worth a trillion dollars. They could have insisted on holding some kind of residual rights. They did not. It was a full walkaway with surrender of all the reactors back to Rossi. It is obvious that they, with years of experience working with Rossi, had concluded that the technology didn’t work, and there was no reasonable chance of making it work. (Darden had said, in a deposition, that if there was even a 1% chance of it working, it would be worth the investment, which is game-theoretically correct.).

There is an alternate explanation, that Rossi violated the agreement and did not disclose the technology to them, not trusting them. But having watched Rossi closely for a long time, they concluded, it’s obvious, that it was all fraud or gross error. (The Lugano test? They made the Lugano devices, but could not find those results in more careful tests, with controls, under their own supervision, and there is a great story about what happened when they became confused and were testing a dummy reactor, with no fuel, and found excess heat. Full details were not given, but at that point, they were probably relying on Rossi test methods. They called Rossi to come up from Florida and look. Together, they opened the reactor, and it had no fuel in it. Rossi stormed out, shouting “The Russians stole the fuel!”

Rossi referred to this because Lewan asked him about it. His answer was the common answer of frauds.

“Darden has said lots of things that he has never been able to prove. What he assures doesn’t exist. I always made experiments with reactors charged by me, or by me in collaboration with Darden. Never with reactors provided to me as a closed box, for obvious reasons.”

First of all, he has a concept of “proof” being required. It  would be required for a criminal conviction, but in a civil trial the standard is preponderance fo the evidence, and Darden’s account, if it were important, would be evidence. (As would Rossi’s, but, notice, Rossi did not actually contradict the Darden account. As has often been seen by Rossi statements, he maintains plausible deniability. “I didn’t actually say that! It’s not my fault if people jumped to conclusions!” Yet in some cases, it is very clear that Rossi encouraged those false conclusions.

It would be up to a jury whether or not to believe it or not. Rossi makes no effort to describe what actually happened in that incident. Then, this was not an experiment “made by” Rossi. It was IH experimentation (possibly of reactors made by Rossi, as to the fueled ones, and then with dummy reactors, supposedly the same but with no fuel). Again, this is common for Rossi: assert something irrelevant that sounds like an answer. He is implying, if we look through the smokescreen, that Darden was lying under oath.

Again, if it matters, at trial, Darden would tell his story and Rossi would tell his story, both under examination and cross-examination. And then the jury would decide. In fact, though, this particular incident doesn’t matter. An emotional outburst by an inventor would not be relevant to any issue the jury would need to describe. A more believable response from Rossi, other than the “he’s lying” implication, would be, “Heh! Heh! I can get a bit excited!” Rossi always avoided questions about the accuracy of measurement methods. With the Lugano test, he rested on the “independent professors” alleged expertise, but there is no clue that these observers had any related experience measuring heat as they did, and the temperature measurements were in flagrant contradiction with apparent visible appearance. Sometimes people, even “professors,” don’t see what is in front of them, distracted by abstractions.

Yes, Rossi always has an explanation.

Rossi never allowed the kind of independent testing that Lewan says, here, that he would require. Whenever interested parties pulled out their own equipment (such as a temperature-measuring “heat gun”), Rossi would shut tests down. Lewan’s hypothesis requires many people to perjure themselves, but this is clear: Rossi lied. He lied about Italian law prohibiting him from testing the original reactor at full power in Italy. He lied about the HydroFusion test (either to IH or to HydroFusion). He lied about the “customer,” claiming the customer was independent, so that the sale of heat to them for $1000 per day would be convincing evidence that the heat was real. He lied about the identity of the customer as being Johnson-Matthey, and the name of the company he formed was clearly designed to support that lie. He presented mealy-mouthed arguments that he never told them that, but, in fact, when Vaughn wrote he was going to London and could visit Johnson Matthey, Rossi told them “Oh, no, I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Your customer is a Florida corporation.” Wink, wink, nod, nod.

It is not clear that anyone else lied, other than relative minor commercial fraud, i.e., Johnson staying quiet when, likely, “Johnson-Matthey” was mentioned, and James Bass pretending to be the Director of Engineering for J-M products, and that could be a matter of interpretation.  Only Rossi was, long-term, and seriously, and clearly, deceptive. Penon may, for example, have simply trusted Rossi to give him good data.

Rossi lied about the heat exchanger, and there are technical arguments and factual arguments on that. He changed his story over the year of the trial. Early on, he was asked about the heat dissipation. “Endothermic reaction,” he explained. If there were an endothermic reaction absorbing a megawatt of power, a high quantity of high-energy density product would need to be moved out of the plant, yet Rossi was dealing with small quantities (actually very small) of product. High-energy-density product is extremely dangerous.

There are endothermic chemical reactions, Rossi was using that fact, but the efficiency of those reactions is generally low. Melting ice would have worked, but would have required massive deliveries of ice, which would have been very visible. Nada.

For many reasons, which have been discussed by many, the heat exchanger story, revealed as discovery was about to close, was so bad that Rossi might have been prosecuted for perjury over it. Lewan seems to have paid no serious attention to the massive discussion of this over the year.

On the page, Rossi makes the argument about solar irradiance being about a megawatt for the roof of the warehouse. Lewan really should think about that! If solar irradiance were trapped in the interior, it would indeed get very, very hot. “Insulation” is not the issue, reflectance would be. Rossi’s expert agreed that without a heat exchanger the heat would reach fatal levels. A heat exchanger was essential, some kind of very active cooling.

Lewan accepts Rossi’s story that he never photographs his inventions, and seems to think it completely normal that Rossi would make this massive device, with substantial materials costs, and labor costs, and have no receipts for either. It was all Rossi Says, with the expert merely claiming “it was possible.” Actually, more cheaply and efficiently, a commercial cooling tower could have been installed. And, of course, all this work would have had to have been complete before the plant was running at full power, and it would have been very, very visible, and noisy, and running 24/7 like the reactor. Nobody reported having seen any trace of it.

A jury would have seen through the deceptions. Pace, the IH lead attorney, was skillful, very skillful. The Rossi counsel arguments were confused and unclear, basically innuendo with little fact. The very foundation of the Rossi case was defective.

The Second Amendment to the Agreement allowing the postponement of the Guaranteed Performance test had never been fully executed as required, and it turned out that this was deliberate on the part of Ampenergo, the Rossi licensee for North America, whose agreement was a legal necessity, and it’s clear that Rossi knew this — he wrote about it in an email — but still he was insisting it was valid. The judge almost dismissed the case ab initio, in the motion to dismiss, but decided to give Rossi the opportunity to find evidence that, say, IH had nevertheless promised to pay (they could have made a side-agreement allowing extension, creating possible problems with Ampenergo, but they could have handled them by paying Ampenergo their cut even if it wasn’t due under the Agreement).

Lewan is a sucker. And so is anyone who, given the facts that came out in trial about Rossi and his business practices, nevertheless invests in Rossi without fully independent and very strong evidence. Sure: “Accurate measurements by third-party experts.” Actually, “third party” is only necessary in a kind of escrow agreement. Otherwise the customer’s experts — and control of the testing process by the customer, presumably with Rossi advice but “no touch” — would be enough. Penon, the “Engineer responsible for validation” was not clearly independent, he was chosen by Rossi, and Rossi objected strongly to any other experts being present for the Validation Test, leading to the IH payment of another $10 million. Later, Rossi excluded the IH director of engineering, violating the agreement with the “customer,” JM Products.

After the test, Penon disappeared. They finally found him in the Dominican Republic, after he had been dismissed as a counter-defendant for lack of service of process (so he was deposed). This whole affair stunk to high heaven. Yet, Lewan soldiers on, in obvious denial of fact, repeating Rossi “explanations” as if plausible when they are not. By the way, the Penon report depended on regular data from Rossi, and the numbers in the Penon report are technically impossible. This was screwed sixty ways till Sunday.

A person associated with Industrial Heat confirmed, privately to me, the agreement, as published by Rossi on Lewan’s blog. At the time of publication, the agreement had not actually been signed by all parties, but that did eventually occur.

There is a whole series of podcasts of Ruby Carat interviews, see http://coldfusionnow.org/cfnpodcast/

She said that she would be interviewing Rossi later.

Review of this podcast on LENR-Forum

abd-ul-rahman-lomax-on-the-cold-fusion-now-podcast/

(All the CFN podcasts in this series are linked from LENR-Forum and are discussed there, at least to some degree)

The first comment comes from Zeus46, who is predictably snarky:

So Abd doubles-down on his claim that IH is working with Swartz, and also chucks Letts into the mix. Someone from Purdue too, apparently.

Many Tshayniks get Hakn’d at Rossi v Darden. Also rumours are mentioned that Texas/SKINR are currently withholding ‘good news’.

Rumours that Abd requested the Feynman reference are possibly entirely scurrilous.

Remarkable how, in a few words, he is so off. First of all, Letts was a well-known IH investment, and there is a document from the trial where the other IH work (to that date, early last year) was described. It was Kim at Purdue who was funded as a theoretician. And I did not mention Swartz, but Hagelstein. I don’t recall ever claiming that IH was “working with Swartz,” but Swartz works with Hagelstein, which might explain how Zeus46 got his idea.

Rossi v. Darden, far from being useless noise, revealed a great deal that was, previously, secret and obscure. Those who only want to make brief smart-ass comments, though, and who don’t put in what it takes to review the record, will indeed end up with nothing useful. It all becomes, then, a matter of opinion, not of evidence and the balance of it.

No “rumor” was mentioned, but reporting what I said becomes a “rumor.” I reported what I had directly from Robert Duncan, which is only a little. They are not talking yet about details, but, asked if they were having problems creating the heat effect, he said “We have had no problem with that,” which I took as good news. Most of our conversations have been about the technicalities of measuring helium, which may seem straightforward, but is actually quite difficult. Still, creating the heat effect is beyond difficult, it is not known how to do it with reliability. But heat/helium measurement does not require reliable heat, only some success, which can be erratic.

“Withholding good news” — I certainly did not say that! — is a misleading way of saying that they are not falling into premature announcement. The minor good news would be that they are seeing heat, his comment implied. But the major news would be about the correlation, and I don’t know what they have in that respect, or where the research stands. I’m not pushing them. They will announce their work, I assume, when they are ready. No more science by press conference, I assume. It will be published, my hope is, in a mainstream journal. I’ve simply been told that, as an author published in the specific area they are working on (heat/helium), they will want to have me visit before they are done.

As to the mention of Feynman, Ruby asked me for a brief bio and I put that in there, because Feynman, and how he thought, was a major influence. It’s simply a fact, though. I sat in those famous lectures, and heard the Feynman stories first-hand when he visited Page House, my freshman year. My life has been one amazing opportunity after another, and that was one of them.

Now, there was a comment on the RationalWiki attack article on me a couple of months back, by a user, “Zeus46”.  Same guy? The author of that article is the most disruptive pseudoskeptic I have ever seen, almost certainly Darryl L. Smith, but his twin brother, Oliver D. Smith is up there as well, and has recently claimed that he made up the story of his brother as a way to be unblocked on Wikipedia. Those who are following this case, generally, don’t believe him, but consider it likely he is protecting his brother, who is reportedly a paid pseudoskeptic, who attacked “fringe science” on Wikipedia and Wikiversity and recruited several Wikipedians to show up to get the Wikiversity resource — which had existed without problems for a decade — deleted, and privately complained to a Wikiversity bureaucrat and later to the WikiMedia Foundation about “doxxing” that wasn’t or that did not violate WMF policy, lying about “harassment,” and also who created the article on RationalWiki as revenge for documenting the impersonation socking they were doing on Wikipedia. They have created many impersonation accounts to comment in various places, and will  choose names that they think might be plausible, and they had reviewed what Zeus46 had written — and what I’d written about him.

So I’d appreciate it if someone on LENR Forum would ask Zeus46 if this was him. If not, he should know that he has been impersonated. He is, to me, responsible for what he writes on LENR Forum, and, by being an anonymous troll (like many Forum users), he’s vulnerable to impersonation.  The goal of the Smiths would be to increase enmity, to get people fighting with each other. It has worked.

My thanks to Shane for kind comments. Yes, it was relatively brief, by design. Ruby had actually interviewed me months before, and it was far too long. I thought I might write a script, but actually did the final interview ad hoc, without notes, but with an idea of the essential points to communicate.

Ruby is a “believer,” I’d say naturally. It’s well known, believers are happier than the opposite. So she is routinely cheerful, a pleasure to talk with. She is also one smart cookie. Her bio from Cold Fusion Now:

At first a musician and performance artist, one day she waltzed into Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and got a physics degree. Thinking that math might be easier, she then earned a Masters degree in Math at University of Miami in Miami, Florida. Math turned out to be not much easier, so now, she advocates for cold fusion, the easiest thing in the world. She has made several short documentary films and speaks on the topic. She currently teaches math at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California and conducts outreach events for the public to support clean energy from cold fusion.

She is an “advocate for cold fusion,” and RationalWiki accuses me of “advocating pseudoscientific cold fusion.” In fact, I’m an advocate of real scientific research, with all the safeguards standard with science, publication in the journal system, same as recommended by both U.S. Department of Energy reviews.

“Cold fusion” is a popular name for a mysterious heat effect. The hypothesis that the effect is real is testable, and definitively so, by measuring a correlated product (as apparently Bill Collis agrees in another podcast, and I know McKubre is fully on board that idea, and that is what they are working on in Texas — and since the correlation has already been reported by many independent groups, this is verification with increased precision, we hope, nailed down.)

Commercial application, which is what Ruby is working for, is not known to be possible. But having a bright and enthusiastic cheerleader like Ruby is one of the best ways to create the possibility.

YES!

Mats Lewan: Losing all balance

New Energy World Symposium planned for June 18-19, 2018

Lewan’s reporting on LENR has become entirely Rossi promotion. I’m commenting on his misleading statements in this announcement.

As originally planned, the Symposium will address the implications for industry, financial systems, and society, of a radically new energy source called LENR—being abundant, cheap, carbon-free, compact and environmentally clean.

Such implications could be as disruptive as those of digitalization, or even more. For example, with such an energy source, all the fuel for a car’s entire life could be so little that it could theoretically be pre-loaded at the time of the car’s manufacture.

While it has been speculated for almost thirty years that LENR would be cheap and clean, we do not actually know that, because we don’t know what it will take to create a usable device. There is real LENR, almost certainly, but there are also real problems with development, and the basic science behind LENR effects remains unknown. There is no “lab rat” yet, a confirmed and reasonably reliable and readily repeatable test set-up known to release sustained energy adequately to project what Lewan is claiming.

Yes, LENR technology could be disruptive. However, it is extremely unlikely to happen rapidly in the short term, unless there is some unexpected breakthrough. Real projects, not run by a blatantly fraudulent entrepreneur, have, so far, only spotty results.

An initial list of speakers can be found on the front page of the Symposium’s website.

I’ll cover the speakers below.

The decision to re-launch the symposium, that was originally planned to be held 2016, is based on a series of events and developments.

What developments? Mats misrepresents what happened.

One important invention based on LENR technology is the E-Cat, developed by the Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi. Starting in 2015, Rossi performed a one-year test of an industrial scale heat plant, producing one megawatt of heat—the average consumption of about 300 Western households.

Mats presents the E-Cat and the heat produces as if factual.

The test was completed on February 17, 2016, and a report by an independent expert confirmed the energy production.

The original Symposium was planned to be based on that report, but the report was not released until well into the lawsuit. Was the “expert” actually independent? Were the test methods adequate? Did the plant actually produce a megawatt? Did the report actually confirm thatt? There is plenty of evidence on these issues, which Lewan ignores.

Unfortunately, a conflict between Andrea Rossi and his U.S. licensee Industrial Heat led to a lawsuit that slowed down further development of the E-Cat technology. This was also why the original plans for the New Energy World Symposium had to be canceled.

Mats glosses over what actually happened. Rossi sued Industrial Heat for $89 million plus triple damages (i.e., a total of $267 million), claiming that IH had defrauded him and never intended to pay what they promised for performance in a “Guaranteed Performance Test.” This account makes it look like Rossi was sued and therefore could not continue development. But the original Symposium was based on the idea of a completed, tested, and fully functional technology with real power having been sold to an independent customer. That did not happen and the idea that it did was all Rossi fraud. Rossi has abandoned the technology that was used in that “test” in Doral, Florida, and is now working on something that does not even pretend to be close to ready for commercialization.

In fact, he could have been selling power from 2012 on, say in Sweden, at least during the winter.

In [July], 2017, a settlement was reached implying that IH had to return the license. During the litigation, IH claimed that neither the report, nor the test was valid, but no conclusive proof for this was ever produced.

It appears that all Lewan knows about the lawsuit is the “claims.” We only need to know a few things to understand what happened. First of all, Rossi filed the suit and claimed he could prove his case. He made false claims in the filing itself, as the evidence developed showed. I could go down this point by point, but Lewan seems to have never been interested in the evidence, which is what is real. “Conclusive proof” commonly exists in the fantasies of fanatic believers and pseudoskeptics. However, some of the evidence in the case rises to that level, on some points. Lewan does not even understand what the points are, much less the balance of the evidence.

There was a huge problem, known in public discussion before it was brought out in the filings. Dissipating a megawatt of power in a warehouse the size of the one in Doral, supposedly the “customer plant,” but actually completely controlled by Rossi, who was, in effect, the customer, is not an easy thing. As the plant was described by Penon, the so-called Expert Responsible for Validation (Rossi claimed, IH denied, and the procedures of the Agreement for that GPT were not followed, clearly), and as Rossi described it publicly, the power simply was either absorbed in the “product” (which turned out to be a few grams of platinum sponge or graphene) or rose out of the roof vents or out the back door. Rossi’s expert confirmed that if there were not more than that, the temperature in the warehouse would have risen to fatal levels. So, very late in the lawsuit, after discovery was almost done, Rossi claimed he had built a massive heat exchanger on the mezzanine, blowing heat out the windows above the front entrance, and that the glass had been removed to allow this.

Nobody saw this heat exchanger, it would have been obvious, and noisy, and would have to have been running 24/7. My opinion is that the jury would have concluded Rossi was lying. My opinion is that IH would have prevailed on most counts of their counterclaim.

But there was a problem. The legal expenses were high. While they did claim that the original $10 million payment was also based on fraudulent representation about the test in Italy (Rossi had apparently lied about it), they were likely estopped from collecting damages for that, so they would only have recovered their expenses from their support of the Doral installation (i.e., the contracted payments to West, Fabiani, and Penon).

They had already spent about $20 million on the Rossi project, and they had nothing to show for it. They did not ask to settle; I was there, the proposal came from a Rossi attorney, a new one (but highly experienced). There was no court order, only a dismissal of all claims on both sides with prejudice.

And Lewan has not considered the implications of that. IH had built the Lugano reactor. They supposedly knew the fuel — unless Rossi lied to them and kept it secret. If anyone knew whether the techology worked or not, they would know. They also knew that, if it worked, it was extremely valuable. Billions of dollars would be a drastic understatement. But, to avoid paying a few million dollars more in legal expenses to keep the license? Even to avoid paying $89 million? (The Rossi claim of fraud on their part was preposterous, and Rossi found no evidence of it, but the contrary, and they had obtained a commitment for $200 million if needed). They would have to be the biggest idiots on the planet.

No, that they walked away when Rossi offered to settle, but wanted the license back, indicates that they believed it was truly worthless.

Lewan is looking for conclusive proof? How about the vast preponderance of evidence here? Mats has not looked at the evidence, but then makes his silly statement about “no conclusive proof.” He could not know that without a detailed examination of all the evidence, so I suspect that he is simply accepting what Rossi said about this.

Which, by this time, is thoroughly foolish. What the lawsuit documents showed, again and again, was that Rossi lied. He either lied to Lewan at that Hydro Fusion test, or he lied to Darden and Vaughn in his email about that test, claiming it was a faked failure (i.e., he deliberately made the test not work so that Hydro Fusion would not insist on their contract because he wanted to work with this billion-dollar company.)

Lewan has hitched his future to a falling star.

Meanwhile, Andrea Rossi continued to develop the third generation of his reactor, the E-Cat QX, which was demoed on November 24, 2017, in Stockholm, Sweden. Andrea Rossi has now signed an agreement with a yet undisclosed industrial partner for funding an industrialization of the heat generator, initially aiming at industrial applications.

Rossi has been claiming agreements with “undisclosed industrial partners” or customers since 2011, but the only actual customer was Industrial Heat. (plus the shell company Rossi created to be the customer for the heat — refusing an opportunity to have a real customer, and that’s clear from Rossi’s email. Lewan is going ahead without actually doing his own research. And he isn’t asking those who know. He appears to be listening only to Rossi.

The E-Cat reaction has also been replicated by others. In March 2017, the Japanese car manufacturer Nissan reported such a replication.

Lewan links to a 19-page document with abstracts. The report in question is here. From that report:

In 2010, A. Rossi reported E-cat, Energy Catalyzer. This equipment can generate heat energy from Ni and H2 reaction and the energy is larger than input one. This experiment was replicated by A Parkhomov but the reaction mechanism has NOT been clarified [1-2]

Naive. It’s worse than that. First of all, the Rossi technology is secret, and Parkhomov was not given the secret, and so it could only be a guess as to replication. NiH effects have been suspected for a long time, but Rossi’s claims were way outside the envelope. Parkhomov’s work was weak, poorly done, and, unfortunately, he actually faked data at one point. He apologized, but he never really explained why he did it. I think he had a reason, and the reason was that he did not want to disclose that he was running the experiment with his computer floating on battery power in order to reduce noise, basically, the setup was punk.

I was quite excited by Parkhomov’s first report. Then I decided to closely examine the data, plotting reactor temperature vs input power. There was no sign of XP. The output power was calculated from evaporation calorimetry and could easily have been flawed, with the methods he was using. And even if he did have power, this certainly wasn’t a “Rossi replication,” which is impossible at this point, since Rossi isn’t disclosing his methods.

Given that, I have no confidence in the Nissan researchers. But what do they actually say?

In this report we will report 2 things. The first one is the experimental results regarding to reproducing Parkhomov’s experiment with some disclosing experimental conditions using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (STA-PT1600, Linseis Inc.). This DSC can measure generated heat within a tolerance of 2%. The second one is our expectation on this reaction for automotive potential.

So Lewan has cited a source for a claim not found there. They did attempt to reproduce “Parkhomov’s experiment,” not the “E-Cat reaction” as Lewan wrote. And they don’t say anything about whether or not they saw excess heat. They say that they will report results, not what those results were.

This is incredibly sloppy for someone who was a careful and professional reporter for years.

This appears to be a conference set up to promote investment in Rossi. I suspect some of the speakers don’t realize that … or don’t know what evidence was developed in Rossi v. Darden. Some may be sailing on like Lewan. Rossi looked interesting in 2011, even though it was also clear then that he was secretive and his demonstrations always had some major flaw. It was almost entirely Rossi Says, and then some appearances and maybe magic tricks. Essen is another embarassment. President of the Swedish Skeptics Society. WTF?

The only names I recognized in the list:

  • Mats Lewan, conference moderator
  • Bob Greenyer

Both have lost most of their credibility over the last year. As to the others:

John Joss, a writer and publisher.

David Orban … no clue that he has any knowledge about LENR, but he would understand “disruptive technologies.” Verture fund. Hey, watch him talk for a minute. I ‘m not impressed. Maybe it’s the weather or something I ate.

Jim Dunn, on several organizational boards, including the board of New Energy Institute, which publishes Infinite Energy, so he’s been around. He wrote a review on Amazon of Lewan’s book.

Thomas Grimshaw, formed LENRGY, LLC  Working with Storms. Perhaps I will meet him at ICCF-21. The most interesting, he has quite a few papers written on LENR and public policy, on lenr-canr.org, going back to 2006.

John Michell. Rossi’s eCat: Free Energy, Free Money, Free People (2011) ‘Nuff said.

Prof. Stephen Bannister, does he realize what he’s getting himself into?

David Gwynne-Evans

Prof. David H. Bailey

(I’ll finish this up tomorrow)

 

Lewan was there, where was the Pony?

Lewan has blogged a report on the Rossi DPS (Dog and Pony Show).

Reflections on the Nov 24 E-Cat QX demo in Stockholm

Mats has become Mr. Sunshine for Rossi. His report on the Settlement Agreement bought and reported without challenge Rossi’s preposterous claims, and it appears that he has never read the strong evidence that Rossi lied, lied, and lied again, evidence presented in Rossi v. Darden as sworn testimony, Rossi’s own emails, etc.

So what do we have here?

Rossi … asked me if I would take the role as the presenter at the event. I accepted on the condition that I would not be responsible for overseeing the measurements (which were instead overseen by Eng. William S. Hurley, with a background working in nuclear plants and at refineries).

Rossi loves experts with a nuclear background, which will commonly give them practically no preparation to assess a LENR device, but it’s impressive to the clueless. See [JONP May 13, 2015] Mr. Hurley apparently falls into reporting Rossi Says as fact without attribution, I’ll come to that.

Although I would not oversee the measurements, I wanted to make sure that the test procedure was designed in a way that would give a minimum of relevant information.

He succeeded, it was a minimum or even less! As to input power, at least. In fact, there are indications from the test that the QX is producing no significant excess heat.

(I think he meant to write “at least a minimum,” but “minimum” in a context like this implies “as little as possible.” He needs an editor.)

From my point of view, already from the start, it was clear that the demo would not be a transparent scientific experiment with all details provided, but precisely a demonstration by an inventor who decided what kind of details to disclose. However, to make it meaningful, a minimum of values and measurements had to be shown.

Mats compares the demo to an extreme, a “transparent scientific experiment.” Given a reasonable need for secrecy, under some interpretations of the IP situation, that wouldn’t happen at this point, Mats is correct on that. However, by holding up that extreme for comparison, Mats justifies and allows what is not even an interesting commercial demonstration, an indication of significant XP, but only a DPS where XP appears if one squints and ignores available evidence. Mats is making the best of a bad show. Why does he do this?

On one hand, I may think that it’s unfortunate that Rossi chooses to avoid some important measurements, fearing that they would reveal too much information to competitors. On the other hand, I may understand him, provided that he moves along quickly to get a product to market, which seems to be his intention at this point.

Rossi could have arranged for measurement of the input power, easily, without any revelation of legitimate secrets.

Rossi could have been selling power, not to mention actual devices, years ago. Rossi has claimed to be moving to market for six years, but only one sale is known, to IH, in 2012, delivered in 2013, which returned the sold plant (and the technology, which, if real, would be worth billions, easily) to him as worthless in 2017. Rossi is looking for customers for heating power, he claims. If his technology has been as claimed, he could readily have had totally convincing demonstrations in place, delivering real heat, as measured and paid for by the customers, but instead chose to try to fake such a sale in Doral, Florida, essentially to himself, with measurements as arranged and reported by … Rossi.

Lewan here reports Rossi’s motives as if fact. He’s telling an old story that made some sense five years ago, perhaps, but that stopped making sense once Rossi sued Industrial Heat and the facts came out.

Lewan presents a pdf with an outline of Gullstrom’s theory.  This is like many LENR theory papers: attempting to answer a general question, regarding LENR, how could it be happening? There have been hundreds of such efforts. None have been experimentally verified through prediction and confirmation. Such “success” as exists has been post-hoc. I.e., theories have been crafted to “explain” results. This, however, is not the scientific purpose of theory, which is to predict. There is no clue in the Gullstrom theory that it is actually connected with experimental results in any falsifiable  way.

Page 6 of the pdf:

Main theory in 3 steps
Short on other theories
Experiment
Comparision theory to experiment
Future

In “Experiment” he has, p. 34:

Observations:789

Energy production without strong radiation.
Isotopic shifts
Positive ion current through air

He does not title his references, I am doing that here, and I am correcting links:

7. The Lugano Report
8. K. A. Alabin, S. N. Andreev, A. G. Parkhomov. Results of Analyses of the
Isotopic and Elemental Composition of Nickel- Hydrogen Fuel Reactors. The link provided to a googledrive copy is dead. There are similar papers here and here.
9. Nucleon polarizability and long range strong force from σI=2 meson exchange potential, Carl-Oscar Gullström, Andrea Rossi, arXiv.

There is a vast array of experimental reports on LENR. The lack of high-energy gamma radiation is widely reported, but it is crucial in such reports that significant excess heat be present. The Lugano report showed no radiation, and showed isotopic shifts, and a later analysis at Upsalla showed the same shifts, but in both cases, the sample was provided by Rossi, not independently taken.

With the Lugano report, the measurement of heat was badly flawed; there was no real control experiment, and the Lugano reactor was made by Industrial Heat, which later found major calorimetry errors in the Rossi approach (used at Lugano), and when these errors were corrected, that design did not work.

Parkhomov considered his own work “replication” of Rossi, but he was only following up on a vague idea that nickel powder plus LiAlH4 would generate excess heat. His first reported experiment was badly flawed, and the full evidence, (what was available) showed no significant excess heat. He went on, but his claims of XP have never been confirmed, in spite of extensive efforts. And the heat he reported became miniscule, compared with Rossi claims.

And then Gullstrom cites his own paper, co-authored with Rossi, which includes an “experimental report” which was similar to the DPS, making the same blunders or omissions (or fraudulent representations). And all this has been widely criticized, which critiques Gullstrom ignores.

None of this is actually connected with the theory. The theory is general and vague.  The only new claim here is:

Positive ion current

New experimental observation: Li/H ratio in plasma is related to
output energy.
Output power is created when negative ions changes to positive ion
kinetic energy in a current.
Neutral plasma→ number and speed of positive and negative ions
that enters the plasma are the same.
COP: Kinetic energy of positive ions/kinetic energy of negative ions.
Non relativistic kinetic energy:

Σ(m+v2/2) / Σ(mv2/2)
♦ Neutral plasma gives: Σ(v+2/2) = Σ(v2/)

This seems to be nonsense. First of all, he has the kinetic energy of the positive current as the sum of the kinetic energy of the positive ions, which will be the sum of, for each ion, mass times velocity squared divided by two. But he appears to divide this by the kinetic energy of the negative ions. The positive ions would be protons, plus vaporized metals. The negative ions would be electrons, for the most part. much lighter. The velocities will depend on the voltages, if we are talking about net current. The voltage is not reported.

Then with a neutral plasma (forget about non-neutral plasmas, the charge balance under experimental conditions is almost exactly equal), he eliminates the mass factor. Sum of velocities is meaningless. The relationship he gives is insane … unless I am drastically missing something!

♦ COP is related to m+/m i.e. in the range mLi/me= 14000 to mH/me= 2000.

So he is “relating” COP to the ratio of the mass of the positive ions to the mass of the electron. Of course, this would have no relationship to most LENR, because “plasma” LENR is almost an oxymoron. This relationship certainly does not follow from the “experimental evidence.” But then the kicker:

Measured COP in the doral test are in the range of thousands.
Li/H ratio are reduced with the COP.

This is rank speculation on Gullstrom’s part. The “Doral test” was extensively examined in Rossi v. Darden. The test itself was fraudulently set up. Rossi refused to allow access to the test to IH engineering, even though they owned the reactor and had an agreement allowing them to visit at any time. And had the COP actually been as high as is claimed here, the building would have been uninhabitable, if there were no heat exchanger, which would have been working hard, noisy, and quite visible, but nobody saw it. Rossi originally explained the heat dissipation with explanations that didn’t work, so, eventually, faced with legal realities, he invented the heat exchanger story, and I’m quite sure a jury would have so concluded, and Rossi might have been prosecuted for perjury.

He avoided that by agreeing to settle with a walk-away, giving up what he had claimed (three times $89 million). This is legal evidence, not exactly scientific, but it’s relevant when one wants to rely on results that were almost certainly fraudulent. Mats has avoided actually studying the case documents, it appears. Like many on Planet Rossi, he sets aside all that human legal bullshit and wants to see the measurements. Except he doesn’t get the measurements needed. At all.

Before a detailed theoretical analysis is worth the effort, there must be reliable experimental evidence of an effect. That evidence does exist for other LENR effects, not the so-called “Rossi Effect.” The exact conditions of the Rossi Effect, if it exists at all, are secret. Supposedly they were fully disclosed to Industrial Heat, but IH found those disclosures useless, in spite of years of effort, supposedly fully assisted by Rossi.

COP was not measured in the DPS. The estimate that was used in the Gullstrom-Rossi paper is radically incorrect. Indications are that actual COP in the DPS may have been close to 1. I.e.., no excess heat. The reason is that there was obviously significant input power not measured, it would be the stimulation power that would strike the plasma. That this was significant is indicated by the needed control box cooling. There is, then, no support for Gullstrom’s theory in the DPS. To my mind, given the massively flawed basis, it’s not worth the effort of further study.

Back to Lewan:

However, if I were an investor considering to invest in this technology, I would require further private tests being made with accurate measurements made by third-party experts, specifically regarding the electrical input power, making such tests in a way that these experts would consider to be relevant. (See also UPDATE 3 on electrical power measurement below).

Lewan is disclaiming responsibility. He seems to be completely unaware of the actual and documented history of Rossi and Industrial Heat. Rossi simply refuses, and has long refused, to allow such independent examination. He’s walked away from major possible investments when this was attempted. He claimed in his previous Lewan interview that he completely trusted Industrial Heat. But he didn’t. It became obvious.

I would place stronger requirements on such testing by investors. The history at this point is enough that an investor is probably quite foolish to waste money on obtaining that expertise, the probability of Rossi Reality is that low. I would suggest to any investor that they first thoroughly investigate the history of Rossi claims and his relationships with investors who attempted to support him. Lewan really should study the Hydro Fusion test that he documented in his book, there are Rossi v. Darden documents that give a very different picture than what Rossi told Lewan and Hydro Fusion.

Rossi Lies.

And “experts” have managed to make huge errors, working with Rossi.

The claims of the E-Cat QX are:

He means “for,” not “of,” since reactors do not make claims.

– volume ≈ 1 cm3
– thermal output 10-30 W
– negligible input control power
– internal temperature > 2,600° C
– no radiation above background

– at the demo, a cluster of three reactors was tested.

This is all Rossi Says. Some of it may be true. It’s likely there was no radiation above background, for example. In any case, Lewan is correct. These are “claims.”

“Control power” is not defined. Plasma stimulation is an aspect of control power, and was not measured, and was obviously not “negligible.” The current that was actually measured was probably a sense current, not “control.”

If a voltage sufficient to strike a plasma was applied (easily it could be 200 V or more), the ionization in the plasma will reduce resistance (though not generally to the effectively zero resistance Rossi claims) and high current will flow at least momentarily. If there is device inductance, that current — and heating — may continue even after the high voltage is removed. (If the power supply is not properly protected, this could burn it out.)

The test procedure contained two parts—thermal output power and electrical input power from the control system—essentially a black box with an unknown design, connected to the grid.

Always, before, total input power was measured. It was certainly measured in Doral! — but also in all other Rossi demonstrations. (And sometimes it was measured incorrectly, Lewan knows that.) Here, Rossi not only doesn’t measure total input power, which easily could have been done without revealing secrets (unless the secret is, of course, a deliberate attempt to create fraudulent impressions), but he also does not measure the output power of the control box, being fed to the QX. This is, then, completely hopeless.

Measuring the thermal output power was fairly straightforward: Water was pumped from a vessel with cold water, flowing into a heat exchanger around the E-Cat QX reactor, being heated without boiling, and then flowing into a vessel where the total amount of water was weighed using a digital scale.

So far, this appears to be reasonable. I have no reason to doubt the heating numbers. The issue is not that. By the way, this simple calorimetry wasn’t done before. Many had called for it. So, finally, Rossi uses sensible calorimetry — and then removes other information necessary to understand what’s going on.

A second method for determining the output power was planned—measuring the radiated light spectrum from the reactor, using Wien’s Displacement Law to determine the temperature inside the reactor from the wavelength with the maximum intensity in the spectrum, and then, Stefan-Boltzmann Law for calculating the radiated power from the temperature.

These two results would be compared to each other at the demo, but unfortunately, the second method didn’t work well under the conditions at the demo, with too much light disturbing the measurement.

Rossi Says. In fact, the method is badly flawed, even if it had worked. Lewan does not mention the theoretical problems, or, at least, the arguments made. The Gullstrom-Rossi paper has been criticized on this basis.

The method for measuring electrical input power was more problematic. The total consumption of the control system could not be used, since the system, according to Rossi, was using active cooling to reduce overheating inside, due to a complex electrical design.

Understatement. Even if “active cooling” was used — a fan in the control box — total consumption could have been measured, it would have supplied an upper limit. It was not shown, likely because that upper limit was well above the measured power output. All that was necessary to avoid the problem, to reduce the measured input power to that actually input to the reactor — which would then heat the reactor — would be to actually measure input voltages, including RMS AC voltage with adequate tools. If that data were sensitive, this could have been done with a competent expert, under NDA. But Rossi does not do that. Ever.

The “complex electrical design” was obviously to operate in two phases: a stable phase, with low power input to the reactor, and a stimulation phase, requiring high voltage and power. The supposed low input power was during the stable phase, the stimulation phase was ignored and not measured. There are oscilloscope displays indicating, clearly, that AC power was involved, not just the measured DC power.

[Update 4]: One hypothesis for the overheating issue is that the reactor produces an electrical feedback that will be dissipated inside the control system and has to be cooled [end update]

There is no end to the bullshit that can be invented to “explain” Rossi nonsense. It would be trivial to design a system so that power produced in the device would be dissipated in the device (i.e., in components within the calorimetric envelope). Any inductor, when a magnetic field is set up, will generate back-EMF as the field collapses, which, to avoid burning out other components, will be dissipated in a snubber circuit.

This problem actually indicates possible high inductance, which would not be expected solely from the plasma device. However, to imagine a “real problem” with a “real device” that, say, creates a current from some weird physics inside, this could be handled quite the same. Voltage is voltage and current is current and they don’t care how they were generated.

Otherwise the high power supply dissipation is from what it takes to create those fast, high-energy pulses that strike the plasma — and, a nifty side-effect — heat the device, while appearing to be negligible, because they only happen periodically.

At this point of R&D of the system, the total energy consumption of the system is therefore at the same order of magnitude as the released amount of energy from the reactor, and it, therefore, makes no sense to measure the consumption of the control system. Obviously, this must be solved, making a control system which is optimised, in order to achieve a commercially viable product.

Right. So 6 years after Rossi announced he had a 1 MW reactor for sale, and after he has announced that he’s not going to make more of those plants, but is focusing solely on the QX, which he has been developing for about two years, he is not even close. That power supply problem, if real, could easily have been resolved. And it was not actually necessary to solve it at this point! Measuring the input to the power supply would not have revealed secrets (except the Big Secret: Rossi has Zilch!), so this was not a reason to not measure it. Sure, it would not have been conclusive, but it would have been a fuller disclosure, eliminating unnecessary speculation. Rossi wants unnecessary speculation, it confuses, and Rossi wants confusion.

And then actual device input power could have been measured in ways that would not compromise possible commercial secrets. After all, he is claiming that it is “negligible.” (Negligible control power probably means negligible control, by the way, a problem in the opposite direction. But I can imagine a way that control power might be very low. It’s not really relevant now.)

Instead, the aim was to measure the power consumption of the reactor itself. Using Joule’s law (P=UI), electrical power is calculated multiplying voltage across some device with the current flowing through the device. However, Rossi didn’t want to measure the voltage across the reactor, claiming that it would reveal sensible information.

“The aim.” Whose aim? This is one way to measure input power. It is not the only way. In any case, this was was not used, because “Rossi didn’t want to.” A measurement observed by an expert, using sound methods — which could be documented — need not reveal sensitive information. But this would require Rossi to trust someone also trusted by others. That is apparently an empty set. I doubt he would trust Lewan. There are also ways that would only show average power. Any electronics engineer could suggest them. Quite simply, this is not a difficult problem.

He would measure the current by putting a 1-ohm resistance in series with the reactor and measuring the voltage across the resistance with an oscilloscope, then calculate the current from Ohm’s law (U=RI), dividing the voltage by the resistance (being 1 ohm). Accepting to use an oscilloscope was good since this would expose the waveform, and also because strange waveforms and high frequencies would make measurements with an ordinary voltmeter not reliable.

This is simply an ordinary current measurement. The oscilloscope is good, if the oscilloscope displays are clearly shown. A digital storage scope would properly be used, with high bandwidth. Lewan is aware that an “ordinary voltmeter” is inadequate. Especially when they are only measuring DC!

But, as mentioned, knowing the current is not enough. Rossi’s claim was that when operating, the reactor had a plasma inside with a resistance similar to that of an ordinary conductor—close to zero. Electrically this means that the reactor would use a negligible amount of power, but it was just an assumption and I wanted to make it credible through other measurements.

This claim is itself quite remarkable. Plasmas exhibit negative resistance, i.e., resistance decreases with current (because the ionization increases so there are more charge carriers), but it does not go to “zero.” Consider an ordinary flourescent light tube. It’s a plasma device. Normal operating voltage is not enough to get it “started.” One it is started, with a high-voltage pulse, then it conducts. A normal tube is, say, 40W. At 120VAC, this would be about 1/3 A RMS. So the resistance is about 360 ohms. This is far from zero! But a very hot, dense plasma might indeed conduct very well, but how much energy does it take to create that? The measurement methods completely neglect that plasma creation energy.

The basic idea Rossi is promoting is that he creates a hot, dense plasma, and that it then self-heats from an internal reaction. That heating is not enough to maintain the necessary temperature, so it cools, until he stimulates it again. This takes an active control system that may sense the condition of the reactor. And that makes what Lewan suggests quite foolish!

My suggestion, which Rossi accepted, was to eliminate the reactor after the active run, replacing it first with a conductor, then with a resistance of about 800 ohms as a dummy, to see how the control system behaved. The conductor should provide a similar measurement value as with the reactor if the reactor behaved as a conductor. Using the 800-ohm resistance, on the other hand, should show whether the control system would possibly maintain the measured current, expected to be around 0.25A, with a higher resistance in the circuit. At 0.25A, a resistance of 800 ohms would consume about 50W, which would be dissipated as heat, and this could then explain the produced heat in the reactor without any reaction, just from electric heating.

The problem is that this is not a decent set of controls. The control system is designed to trigger a plasma device, which will have, before being triggered, very high resistance. Much higher than 800 ohms, I would expect. Lewan does not mention it, but the voltage he expected across the 800 ohm resistor would be 200 V. Dangerous. Lewan is looking for DC power. That’s not what is to be suspected.

By the way, an ordinary pocket neon AC tester can show voltages over 100 V. I would expect that one of those would light up if placed across the reactor, at least during triggering. Some of these are designed to approximately measure voltage.

Lewan is not considering the possibility of an active control system that will sense reactor current. His test would provide very little useful information. So the behavior he will see is not the behavior of the system under test.

[UPDATE 3]: I now think I understand why Rossi wouldn’t let us measure the voltage across the reactor. Rossi has described the E-Cat QX as two nickel electrodes with some distance between them, with the fuel inside, and that when the reactor is in operation, a plasma is formed between the electrodes.

Right. That is the description. What we don’t know is if there are other components inside the reactor, most notably, as a first-pass suspicion, an inductor and possibly some capacitance.

Most observers have concluded that a high voltage pulse of maybe 1kV is required to form the plasma.

Maybe less. At least, I’d think, 200 V.

Once the plasma is formed the resistance should decrease to almost zero and the control voltage immediately has to be reduced to a low value.

Yes. Or else very high current will flow and something may burn out. This is ordinary plasma electronics. “Almost zero” is vague. But it could be low. Rossi wants the plasma to get very hot. So the trigger pulse will be longer than necessary to simply strike the plasma. However, there may also be local energy storage, in an inductor and/or capacitor. A high current for a short time can be stored as energy, then this can be more slowly released.

Normally, and as claimed by Rossi, the plasma would have a resistance as that of a conductor,

Calling this “normal” is misleading. He would mean “when very hot.”

and the voltage across the reactor will then be much lower than the voltage across the 1-ohm resistor (measured to about 0.3V—see below). Measuring the voltage across the reactor will, therefore, be difficult:

Nonsense. It might take some sophistication. What Lewan is claiming here, is remarkable. This would be difficult to measure because of the high voltage!

The high voltage pulse risks destroying normal voltmeters and measuring the voltage with an oscilloscope will be challenging since you first have to capture the high voltage pulse at probably 1 kilovolt and then immediately after you would need to measure a voltage of maybe millivolts. [end update]

Lewan is befogged. We don’t really care about the “millivolts” though they could be measured. What we really care about is the power input with the high voltage pulse. The only function of that low voltage and the current in the “non-trigger” phase is to provide information back to the control unit about plasma state. When the input energy has been radiated — in this test, conducted away in the coolant — the plasma will cool and resistance will increase, and then the control box will generate another trigger. The power input during that cooling phase is negligible, as claimed.

But the power input during the triggers is not negligible, it is substantial, and, my conclusion, this is how the device heats the water.

That high voltage power could easily be measured with an oscilloscope, and with digital records using a digital storage oscilloscope. (Dual-channel, it could be set up to measure current and voltage simultaneously.) They are now cheap. (I don’t know about that Textronix scope. It could probably do this, though.)

At the demo, 1,000 grams of water was heated 20 degrees Celsius in one hour, meaning that the total energy released was 1,000 x 20 x 4.18 = 83,600J and the thermal power 83,600/3600 ≈ 23W.

The voltage across the 1-ohm resistor was about 0.3V (pulsed DC voltage at about 100kHz frequency), thus the current 0.3A. The power consumed by the resistor was then about 0.09W and if the reactor behaved as a conductor its power consumption would be much less.

I continue to be amazed that Planet Rossi calls “pulsed voltage” “DC.” What does 0.3 V mean? He gives a pulse frequency of 100 kHz. Is 0.3 V an average voltage or peak? Same with the current. And Lewan knows better, from his past criticism of Rossi, than to calculate power by multiplying voltage and current with other than actual DC. What is the duty cycle? What are the phase relationships?

Basically, this is an estimate of power consumption only in the non-trigger phase, ignoring the major power input to the reactor, enough power to heat it to very hot plasma temperatures and possibly to also create some continued heating for a short time.

Using a conductor as a dummy, the voltage across the 1-ohm resistance was about 0.4V, thus similar as with the reactor in the circuit. With the 800-ohm resistance, the voltage across the 1-ohm resistance was about 0.02V and the current thus about 0.02A. The power consumption of the 800-ohm resistance was then 0.02 x 0.02 x 800 ≈ 0.3W, thus much lower than the thermal power released by the reactor.

The power supply was operating in the non-trigger mode. The plasma at 800 ohms is still conductive. What happens as the resistance is increased? What I’d think of is putting a neon tester across the reactor and pulling the 800 ohms. I’d expect the tester to flash, showing high voltage. Unless, of course, someone changed the reactor programming (and there might be a switch to prevent unwanted triggers, which could, after all, knock someone touching this thing on their ass. Hopefully, that’s all.).

These dummy measurements can be interpreted in a series of ways, giving a COP (output power/input power) ranging from about 40 to tens of thousands. Unfortunately, no precise answer can be given regarding the COP with this method, but even counting the lowest estimate, it’s very high, indicating a power source that produces useful thermal power with a very small input power for controlling the system.

Lewan has not considered interpretations that are even likely, not merely possible. His “lowest estimate” completely neglects the elephant in this living room, the high voltage trigger power, which he knows he did not measure. Lewan’s interpretations here can mislead the ignorant. Not good.

At the demo, as seen in the video recording, Rossi was adjusting something inside the control system just before making the dummy measurements. Obviously, someone could wonder if he was changing the system in order to obtain a desired measured value.

His own answer was that he was opening an air intake after two hours of operation since the active cooling was not operating when the system was turned off.

It is always possible that an implausible explanation is true. But Rossi commonly does things like this, that will raise suspicions. Why was that air intake ever closed? Lewan takes implausible answers from Rossi and reports them. He never questions the implausibility.

My own interpretation here of what happened does not require any changes to the control box, so, under this hypothesis, Rossi messing around was just creating more smoke. Rossi agreed to the 800 ohm dummy because he knew it would show what it showed. The trigger resistance might be far higher than that. (But I have not worked out possibilities with an inductor. That circuit might be complex; we would not need to know the internals to measure reactor input power.)

There are many possibilities, and to know what actually happened requires more information than I have. But the need for control box active cooling is a strong indication of high power being delivered to the QX.

[Update 2]: Someone also saw Rossi touch a second switch close to the main switch used for turning on and off the system. Rossi explained that there were actually two main switches—one for the main circuit and one for the active cooling system—and that there were also other controls that he couldn’t explain in detail. [end update].

Clearly this comes down to a question of trust, and personally, discussing this detail with Rossi for some time, I have come to the conclusion that his explanation is reasonable and trustworthy.

That’s it. This is Lewan’s position. He trusts Rossi, who has shown a capacity for generating “explanations” that satisfy his targets enough that they don’t check further when they could.

Rossi appears, then, as a classic con artist, who is able to generate confidence, i.e., a “confidence man.” Contrary to common opinion, genuine con artists fool even quite smart people. They know how to manipulate impressions, “conclusions,” which are not necessarily rational, but emotional.

The explanation for touching the power supply might be entirely true, and Lewan correct in trusting that explanation, but this all distracted him from the elephant: that overworked control box! And then the trigger power. How could one ignore that? A Rossi Force Field?

Here below is the test report by William S. Hurley, as I received it from Rossi:

This part of this report is straightforward, and probably accurate.

Energy produced:  20 x 1.14 = 22.8 Wh/h

But I notice one thing: “Wh/h.” That is a Rossi trope. It is not that it is wrong, but I have never seen an American engineer use that language. Rossi always uses it. An American engineer not writing under Rossi domination would have written “average power: 22.8 W.” Or “energy produced: 22.8 Wh” (since the period was an hour). As written, it’s incorrect. Wh/h is a measure of power, not energy. It is a rate.

But this part of the report is bullshit, for all the reasons explained above:

Measurement of the energy consumed ( during the hour for 30′ no energy has been supplied to the E-Cat) :
V: 0.3
OHM: 1
A: 0.3
Wh/h 0.09/2= 0.045
Ratio between Energy Produced and energy consumed: 22.8/0.045 = 506.66

So this calculation uses the 50% (30 min out of 60) duty cycle stated (which was not shown in the test, as far as I have seen). Without that adjustment, a factor of two, the “input power” would be 90 mW. Again, “energy consumed” is incorrect. What is stated is average power, not energy. This shows lack of caution on the part of Hurley, if Hurley actually wrote that report.

But this totally neglects the trigger power, as if it didn’t exist. One could supply any waveform desired at 90 mW without a lot of additional power being necessary. Hurely presumably witnessed the triggers, they generated visible light. Does he think that was done at 0.3 V? On what planet?

(Planet Rossi, obviously.)

The energy “consumed” was not measured! How many times is it necessary to repeat this?

However, with a power supply with about 60W of active cooling, according to the Lewan slide, that the power supply was producing all the measured output power is plausible.

To sum up the demo, there were several details that were discussed, from the problematic electrical measurement to observations of Rossi touching something inside the control system just before an additional measurement was being made (see below). [Update 1]: It was also noted that the temperature of the incoming water was measured before the pump and that the pump could possibly add heat. However, the temperature did not raise at the beginning of the demo when only the pump was operating and not the reactor. Rossi also gave the pump to me after the demo so that I could dismantle it (will do that), together with a wooden block where a 1-ohm resistance was mounted, which he also advised me to cut through (will do that too). [End update].

The  touching and the pump issue were probably red herrings. But, yes, what where they thinking, measuring the temperature before the pump instead of after? One of the tricks of magicians is to allow full inspection of whatever is not a part of the actual trick. A skilled magician will sometimes deliberately create suspicion, then refute it.

In the end, I found that there were reasonable explanations for everything that occurred, and the result indicated a clear thermal output with a very small electrical input from the control system.

Lewan was aware of the problems, but then fooled himself with his useless dummy. Just a moment’s thought, it would take, to realize that there is energy going into the reactor, at high voltage, occasionally, and then this would make it very clear that the real input power wasn’t measured.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, the QUA[R]CK-X!

LenrForum:

Demonstration thread started November 15Start reading here, Alan posted before the DPS (Dog and Pony Show) started.

E-Catworld:

Youtube:

3 hours. As I write this, I have not yet viewed more than a little of it. I will be compiling links to specific times in this video, and will appreciate assistance with that. Above, by the headline and by “DPS”, I reveal my ready conclusion. I will be providing a basis for that, but, meanwhile, fact is fact and we need be careful not to confuse fact with conclusion.

Test methods

From this page:

Here are the slides that Mats Lewan used in the first segement of the E-Cat QX demonstration of November 24, 2017 in which he gave an introduction to the E-Cat QX and explained how the presentation was to proceed.

Unless he hedged this in the actual presentation (and I will edit this if I find that he did), Mats is responsible for this content.

Slide 1:

E-CAT QX

Third generation of the patented E-Cat technology:
A heat source built on a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR)
with a fuel based primarily on nickel, aluminum, hydrogen and
lithium, with no radiation and with no radioactive waste.

The fuel is “Rossi Says” [* is used below] “No radiation” is possibly controversial: many tests, however, have looked for radiation and found little or none.

Claims E-Cat QX:

I have numbered the claims, and brief comments:

1. volume ≈ 1 cm3 [plausible]
2. thermal output 10-30 W [plausible as dissipation in device]
3. negligible input control power [* not plausible]
4. internal temperature > 2,600° C [* unlikely]
5. no radiation above background [plausible]

Today: Cluster of 3 E-Cat QX

Slide 2: (diagram, shows water circulation)

Water reservoir -> K-probe  -> QX -> K-probe -> Water tank on scale

(This looks simple and solid. While a magician or fraud, given control of conditions, can create fake anything, if there is fraud here, it is probably not in this part of the test.)

Slide 3: (calculations)

Thermal output
W = mwater* Cp* ∆T
Cp water = 4.18 J/(g·K)
Pav = W/t

W is, misleadingly but harmlessly, in a common confusion in Rossi presentations, not wattage but energy, in watt-seconds or Joules. Average power, in watts, is then is the energy divided by the measurement interval.

Slide 4:

Thermal output

(diagram, QX light -> spectrometer)

Wien’s displacement law:
λmax = b/T or T = b/λmax
where b ≈ 2900 μm·K
Stefan–Boltzmann law:
P = AεσT4
where
A = area
ε = emissivity
σ ≈ 5.67 × 10−8 W/(m2⋅K4)

This is BS. The QX is allegedly a plasma device, and light from a plasma does not follow the laws for black-body radiation. Light can appear to be intense but the energy will be in narrow bands, characteristic of the plasma gas. This approach simply does not work. However, it is not actually a significant part of the test. A very small spot can be very hot, that does not show high overall power if the very hot region is small, with low mass, and, as well, if it is transient.

(Mats in the video claims that the device is “similar to a black body,” but no evidence is provided for that claim.)

Slide 5: (schematic diagram)

Electric input. [explanation at video 11:28)

Shown is AC line power (unmeasured) feeding a Direct Current source (the symbol for DC is used), incorporating a fan, “active cooling ca. 60 W”. Then the DC output is connected to a 1 ohm sense resistor, and there is a voltmeter across it. Then the other side of the resistor is connected to one terminal of the QX. There are two labels, overprinted, “0 Ω” and “800 Ω.” This refers to two conditions, the zero resistance is to test conditions, allegedly, and the 800 ohms is a Lewan “test” which shows essentially nothing. The other side of the QX returns to the power supply.

I = U/R
P = UI
P = RI2
800 * 0.252 ≈ 50 W

This is utter nonsense. There is no reported measurement of the “power input” to the QX. This is the same preposterousness as was in the Gullstrom paper, widely criticized. What is “U”? Unstated. Perhaps it is in the videos. By the formula it is a voltage, the voltage used to determine the current through the 1 ohm sense resistor. If I is then that current, “P” would be the power dissipated in the sense resistor. The figure of 800 is used, but this is not under test conditions, the QX has been replaced by the 800 ohm resistor. So there is, from the power supply, 50W of power delivered to an 800 ohm resistor, apparently. This means what? It means about 200 V, that’s what!

Mats says in the video that the white box is the power source. Then he says it is a black box. Well, Mats? Which is it, white or black? He describes it as producing “direct current, which is pulsed.” That is quite different from “direct current,” depending on details. Mats says that the 1 ohm resistor is not necessary for the function of the generator. Yet, in operation, the resistance of the QX is described as zero. These descriptions have driven many who know a little electronics crazy. Yes, the 1 ohm resistor is a sense resistor, used only to measure current, but if the QX resistance is actually zero, nothing would limit current other than the supply max, and there would be no control.

The QX is a plasma device. Such devices have high resistance until a plasma is struck. It appears from the video that a plasma is repeatedly struck. At that point the voltage to the QX must be high. There will then be a short period when input power to the QX is high, until the resistance drops and input power with it. Zero resistance is quite unlikely. There is no evidence shown in the video of zero resistance, but the largest missing is any actual measure of input power.

At 13:22, Lewan explains the Rossi insanity that the heat of the reactor is conducted through the cables to the power supply, causing destruction of components. Later, on ECW, Lewan reports that Rossi is “no longer” giving this explanation. But why did he believe it in the first place?

This is said to explain the cooling fan for the power supply.

I later said, during the presentation, that Rossi no longer claims the heating problem is due to heat through the wires, but an internal heating problem in the control box. Fulvio Fabiani, who has built the original design of the control system, confirmed this, and said that it would need investments to and resources to build a control system that eliminates this problem. I agree that this seems strange. However, high voltage, high frequency, and high velocity might be challenging, combined.

The power supply is creating an output with substantial high voltage and frequency, but nothing shown as input to the reactor is high voltage or frequency. There is no consideration in the input power discussion of anything other than direct current, at low voltages.

It is obvious: there is high-frequency power being generated, and there is indirect evidence in the demo that this is roughly enough to explain the reported output power. I was discussing this today with David French, and he said that a test with forbidden measurements of a factor that might be crucial is not a test. He’s obviously correct.

If Rossi were a reliable reporter, we might decide to trust his reports. But there is voluminous evidence in Rossi v. Darden that he is not reliable. For as long as I have been following Rossi (since early 2011), he has put on one demonstration after another where some critical factor was hidden. With some of his early E-Cat demos, it was claimed that the cooling water was all vaporized, that the output was “dry steam,” but a humidity meter was used to verify this, and humidity meters cannot measure steam dryness. The physicists observing these tests had no steam experience and were easily fooled. In the Krivit video, Rossi clearly knows that there is condensed or overflow water in the output hose, because he walks it to the drain before pulling the hose out to show Krivit the steam flow, which was completely inadequate for the claimed evaporation rate. And that little demonstration concealed that water was slowly overflowing, and overflow was never checked. (Overflow is a different and larger concern than steam quality; steam quality itself was a red herring.)

In discussions on LENR Forum, THHuxleynew wrote:

Alan Smith wrote:

[…] The 800 ohm resistor was used as part of the calibration demonstration. Since the Q-X has virtually zero resistance there is not much point in measuring the voltage drop across it, so in order do show that (for example) an 800 ohm resistive heater was NOT present inside the Q-X capsule, the Q-X was taken out of circuit and a low-wattage 800 ohm resistor was put in its place. The voltage drop was measured again over the 1 ohm resistor to show there was a significant difference. This also was used to prove that the PSU was a constant voltage device, not a constant current device.

Anyone with substantial electronics experience would know how crazy-wrong this is. You don’t know that a device has “virtually zero resistance” unless you measure the voltage drop across it at a known current. The resistance of quite good conductors can be measured this way.

In any case, one would measure the voltage across the QX to verify that it is low (or “zero” as claimed, which is very unlikely for a plasma device.) Who there has experience with plasma devices? I played with neon tubes when I was young, great fun. Yes, they show “negative resistance,” i.e., the more current that flows through them, the lower the resistance, but zero? This is a major discovery all of its own, if true. It almost certainly is not. But the resistance of the QX might well be very low, because it is not the resistance of a plasma device, but of an inductor.

The test does not show what Alan claims for it. An ordinary 800 ohm resistive heater was not a reasonable possibility. With no measurement of voltage, this is all meaningless. The power supply is said to be “adaptive,” so conditions for the QX test and the 800 ohm resistor could be different. There was no description of what was actually done. The power measured with 800 ohms, from calculations was 50 W, which would certainly not be a “low wattage” resistor. But then there is more:

That is a weirdly indirect way of showing the QX has a low impedance. Also it is likely wrong! What was the 800 ohm resistor cal current? You also can’t prove CV from a single measurement.

only Rossi would give such indirect and dubious evidence… Why not measure the PSU voltage directly?

Sekrit, that’s why!

THHuxleynew wrote:

Also, these voltage measurements, are they DC or AC? And is the supply DC or AC? Without all these questions answered the word prove that Alan uses is way off beam… Impedance is not a single value independent of frequency. Nor is the QX likely linear.

Indeed. Alan’s response?

Alan Smith wrote:

The QX is stated to have near zero resistance. Which tends to suggest it has near zero impedance. Though after 5 beers I am not looking for an argument about that. Have at it.

After 5 beers, it gets worse.

THHuxleynew wrote:

[…] Suppose it has low resistance when in plasma state but high resistance when off. Driven by AC it would have varying impedance, and maybe absorb much power during these HV spikes some believe exist.

Or, take an inductor in parallel with a resistor. Low impedance at DC, high resistance at AC.

Perhaps I need to drink some more wine to even things up…

He’d have to drink a lot to approach Alan’s dizziness….

Oldguy points to the obvious: [To Alan]

Was the 800 ohm resister inductive or non inductive?

I am still having trouble with the claim that the claim that the device has “virtually zero resistance”.

Was it measured while running? How was that measured for the system as demonstrated?

Sure seem like there IS a “point in measuring the voltage drop across it”. A major point. It is possible to have a device with a low DC resistance but high inductive impedance. If there was any pulses or AC present, it could make a very big difference. -(example: a wire coil around some Ni) If It is to demonstrate the reality of excess then the voltage needs to be measured across with what ever waveform it is running with.

One would think. But Rossi certainly does not think like this. Unless he does. Unless he figured out  a way to make it appear, to those who don’t look or think carefully, that he is putting on low power, when he is putting in much more, there in plain sight and actually obvious and even necessary.

Alan Smith wrote: (about Oldguy’s “device”)

Tell me about this device? A choke perhaps? I think you will struggle to find me a good example.

Weird, indeed, probably the beers talking. He said the word: “choke.” That’s an example.

Oldguy also wrote:

No, again, you can have near zero DC resistance but have a large inductive impedance to high frequency (or spikes). The narrower the pulses the greater the “effective resistance” for an inductive device. […]

A simple wire coil with a nickel or cobalt core would do it. For example, a 10 mH inductor, would appear to have near zero resistance (depending on gauge) but about 4 ohms at 60 Hz and 7.5 ohms at 120 Hz and then about 160 ohms at 2500 Hz. Very fast pulses (single wave of a very high freq in effect) would make the effective R very high and with power going as V^2 you could transfer a significant power. A flyback transformer, cap and a read vibrator could easily be put in the housing of most DC supplies to add high V pulses.

Bottom line – the DC and AC across the device must [be] measured while running or you know nothing about possible power consumption.

Yes. The DPS pretends otherwise, and Mats Lewan, while he is aware of the massive deficiencies, goes along with it. It does not appear that Rossi invited anyone likely to question his claims. Mats seems to be on some kind of edge. Yet, in the end, he’s been had.

THHuxleynew:

All these (dubious even at DC) indirect measurements are no good if the PSU is AC, or has HV AC spikes.

Rossi, remember, has a proven (by Mats, of all people) history of mismeasuring things with meters to show positive COP from devices that are actually electric heaters.

Adrian Ashfield wrote:

Alan Smith wrote:

Tell me about this device? A choke perhaps? I think you will struggle to find me a good example.

The pathoskeptics are just looking for a way to back up their previous firmly held opinions. I doubt you can win against hem short of units for sale.

Even if the setup were perfect they would say the readings were false, or there’s hidden battery, etc, etc. The current and voltage appears to be low enough that would be very difficult claim measurement error would wipe away a COP of 300.

Ashfield has shown again and again that he is utterly clueless. There are certainly pseudoskeptics who will not accept even good evidence, but they are matched by pseudoscientists (i.e., “believers”) who assume what they want without evidence. Here, Ashfield has nothing to contribute to the conversation, but still bloviates about what he has no understanding of.

Genuine skeptics (people like THHuxleynew) are very important for the future of LENR, because they can form the bridge. Genuine skeptics are willing to look at evidence and not dismiss it out-of-hand.

As to Ashfield’s claim, input power was not measured, and easily could be enough for a COP of 1. I.e., no excess power. Mats Lewan even points this out:

‘I think the demonstration today went well, with some limits that depends on what Rossi will accept to measure publicly. The problematic part is that the voltage over the reactor could not be measured, which would be necessary to calculate the electric power consumed by the reactor. In the calculations made by Rossi and Eng. William S. Hurley, who oversaw the measurements, the power consumed by the 1-ohm resistor was used as input power instead, assuming that the plasma inside the reactor has a resistance close to that of a conductor, thus consuming a negligible amount of power since the voltage across the reactor would be very low.

(“could not be measured” because Rossi would not allow it. Then it is claimed that it was “very low,” but the evidence for this is entirely missing. They don’t even try. The power dissipated in the 1 ohm sense resistor would be irrelevant, having almost no relationship to the QX input power. That only shows DC current, not power input, even at DC, and no attempt was made to measure RMS power, and there was very substantial RMS power, it’s obvious.)

[…] it seems strange that the power supply, even if it is a complex design, is such that it needs significant active cooling, resulting in a total system that has a COP of about 1 or less at this point.

That power supply needs cooling because it is generating high voltage pulses to strike the plasma, and with no measurement of these (and it seems that the pulsing was frequent), there is no clue as to input power, but it easily could be enough to explain the “output” power.

William S. Hurley III

Sam provided a list of comments on JONP from Hurley.  It came from LENR Forum, Bill H.  (There appear to be many more comments from Hurley there.) There is speculation about Hurley on LENR Forum, with people doing a search, finding a William Hurley, and then saying that this is the DPS engineer. No. There is more than one Hurley, that much I had. I suspect the DPS Hurley lives in Huntington Beach, California, but I haven’t yet seen any strong evidence. However, his alleged company name, somewhere (I think in Lewan information), was spelled Endeavor. From the JONP comments, it is Andeavor. $6 billion in assets. Web site.

Bruce H wrote:

Alan Smith wrote:

He is Willam Hurley, an engineer who works in the oil business. That’s what he told me. At the beginning of the demo he was introduced as an an ‘overseeing expert’. But he was pretty low key for that role. nodding now and then was most of it.

Thanks. I think he probably has the background he claims. My interest is in his role in the proceedings. One thing that has puzzled me is that a summary of COP calculations was sent to Mats Lewan and then posted on ECW over his name (http://e-catworld.com/2017/11/…comments-from-mats-lewan/), and yet this report is written in Rossi-ese complete with “Wh/h” notation and slightly ungrammatical English.

He strikes me as a pawn who was under the impression that he had an important role in the proceedings, but in reality did not.

I pointed out the Wh/h trope yesterday. There is a history behind this. I once pointed to Rossi’s usage of Wh/h for power as a “trope.” That did not  mean “error.” It is simply relatively rare, i.e., idiosyncratic. I’ve researched it fairly deeply, it may be more common in Europe, and I think Jed said some Japanese use it. I have never seen an American engineer or scientist use this.

In my training, we always reduced units. Working with units like that is an important part of learning science and engineering.

Wh is watt-hour, i.e., 1 watt for one hour. The SI unit is joules/second, but the definition of a joule is one watt-second, i.e., one watt for one second. So an alternate unit for energy is watt-second, and watt-hour is common. The unit for power is simply “watt.”

I explained all this maybe a year ago. Rossi commented on it, claiming it was completely wrong, and his treatment showed that he thinks of “watt-hour” as a unit of energy, and that then power is the obvious rate, watt-hours/hour. He claimed the “hour” cannot be cancelled, and for further discussion, he referred to an well-known book author. I researched this issue in that author’s work, and found that he confirmed that the “hour” would cancel out. I.e., Rossi’s source contradicted Rossi. Rossi never, however, admits error.

It was not the use of wh/h that was wrong, that would be a pedantic objection. Rather it was his claim that “watt” or “kilowatt” was wrong.

(By the way, Rossi called the Plant the “1 MW E-cat.” Not the “1 MWh/h E-cat.”)

The point was not that Wh/h was incorrect, but that this was a red flag that this was not written by an American engineer, unless he was copying Rossi.

There is another clear sign: the company name spelling “Endeavor” is in that text, linked by Bruce H, taken from ECW. Hurley would not make that mistake. Period. Rossi would, easily. Rossi wrote that report. Hurley may have approved it, but even there, I’d expect the Endeavor error would have stood out for him and he’d have corrected it.

Alan Smith wrote:

Bruce_H wrote: “Wh/h”

Don’t start this again or we will have MY banging on about it. Wh/h is power supply engineer shorthand for the sustained load a system can handle. It is however not a recognised SI or Imperial unit of measurement.

Alan doesn’t want accurate information expressed because MY will jump on it? His comment may be misleading, or may be accurate for Great Britain, where he lives. However, “Wh/h” is not how a power supply engineer would express the load a system can handle. They would either state that it can handle X Watts for time T. Or they would state that the system can deliver so many Wh, but they would want to state peak load. Another way to say this is that a supply can sustain a load of so many watts (time not specified, and time is not specified in Wh/h, it’s an average). “Sustained” in this case is about what the supply will do without burning out. It’s a rating.

Bruce_H wrote:

I agree completely. I only use it as an indicator that that it was not Mr Hurley who wrote the report that appears over his name.

This is the DPS Hurley.

Tesoro Senior Project Engineer, Tesoro Petroleum Corp.

(Tesoro became Andeavor, August 1, 2017.)

This is also Hurley, engineer for a radio license with an address given for Tesoro in Huntington Beach., 2101 E PACIFIC COAST HWY, LOS ANGELES, WILMINGTON, CA. Mr. Hurley has a boat.

If it were important, we could contact Mr. Hurley. It’s not. We know what data he worked with, and if he made a mistake, as we think, it is no skin off our teeth. He should know, however, that he is hitching his reputation to a known fraud and con artist.

I finally found his Linked-In profile. It’s listed under Bill Hurley. (there are many of these.) Behold:

 

Mr. Hurley has a decent background. However, he has a conflict of interest. Considering the above, he would want, at this point, to encourage Rossi to deal with him. He gains no benefit by being skeptical in his analysis, as long as he is honest with his employer, and he would know, if he’s researched Rossi history, that any sign of significant skepticism, he’d be history in the Rossi story.

If Andeavor actually buys a reactor — or power — from Rossi, this would become very, very interesting. Otherwise, this is SOP for Rossi.

How to win by losing: give up and declare victory!

And that’s what Rossi did, in spite of the insanity proclaimed on LENR Forum and elsewhere, and his followers lap it up, even though, like much buzz on Planet Rossi, it is utterly preposterous.

For a year, on his blog, Rossi had been proclaiming that he was going to demolish IH in the lawsuit, that he had proof, etc. Out of eight counts alleged, four were dismissing from a motion (and a count must be really poor to be dismissed at that stage — and what remained was hanging on a thread. Maybe Rossi could come up with some killer proof in discovery. That never happened, all that Rossi found were some ambiguous statements that, if one squinted, could look a little like what he was claiming, whereas the other side was heavily supported. Continue reading “How to win by losing: give up and declare victory!”

Is there a survival benefit for stupidity?

Continuing Hope springs eternal.

Is there a survival benefit for stupidity?

Probably not for stupidity itself, but possibly for persistence in the face of obstacles, if the person does know when to fold.

My son was about ten years old, walking in the woods with his friend. Recognizing poison oak, he told his friend to be careful not to touch it. His friend said, “That’s not poison oak!” My son said, yes, it is. His friend said, “Look!” and rubbed his face with the plant. Continue reading “Is there a survival benefit for stupidity?”

Winning by losing

Somtimes I think of a catchy or snarky title, then write the blog post. Here, I’m just writing and will figure out a title later.

I was again mentioned on LENR Forum.

SSC wrote:

Dewey Weaver wrote:

Of course now SSC thinks there was a trial.

There was a judge, a jury, a courtroom, lawyers ……… but maybe you are right, I’m probably the one who understood bad ….. they were all there to play a joke on Abd, right?

Little does he know! The entire universe is here to play a joke on Abd. The best part of the game is getting it. Continue reading “Winning by losing”

Zero in Rossi-speak

Rossi was asked about the resistance of the Quark-X, and he answered “zero.” When his fans, even, pointed out that this would make it a superconductor, he then “explained,”

August 10, 2017 at 6:40 PM

Frank Acland:
No.
Superconductivity is a completely different thing.
Obviously my “zero” was not absolute, it was jargon for good conductor ( otherwise I wouldn’t write it in letters). I just wanted to say that it is a good conductor, like copper, so that its resistance ( that cannot be R = 0 ) does not affect the circuit.

Rossi is lying. That is, he is making up a story for why he said “zero.” There is quite another reason. Continue reading “Zero in Rossi-speak”

Sifferkollamity

Sifferkoll has been active on LENR Forum, arguing for the right to insult. Not surprising. His blog has skated around the edge of libel, which is criminal in Sweden, and one might think that libeling billion-dollar corporations would generate some caution, but … No.

Did Woodford Recently Buy Industrial Heat Shares at a 87% discount?
Posted on 2017/07/23

This was based on two Ahlfors images from LENR Forum. Sifferkoll commonly doesn’t link to ready verification. Neither does Ahlfors, and commonly Ahlfors images are, ah, unclear in significance. In this case, Sifferkoll has a history of misinterpreting data from Industrial Heat. Continue reading “Sifferkollamity”

Something is stupid on the internet

Actually, on Rossi’s blog. This has become so unsurprising that I intend to stop covering it unless asked.

Planet Rossi thinks of Rossi as a great genius, and he is often asked about scientific questions. I have previously shown how he commonly has little clue what he’s talking about, his knowledge is shallow, as might be expected from a jailhouse student, as he was. (Though the “electrical engineering” involved here I originally learned early in high school.) This shallow knowledge is distinct from the issue of whether or not he has a real technology, but it can have an impact on how he talks about it.

(By the way, I was a prison chaplain, and knew many intelligent prisoners. I am simply pointing out the possible limitations of prison study. One will not have the benefit of a community of study, it’s isolated and generally solitary. Unless one is taking a correspondence course — some do — there will be no testing, no writing of papers for professorial review, no opportunity to make mistakes and be corrected, which is the fastest way to learn.) Continue reading “Something is stupid on the internet”

Lying with facts

On LENR Forum, SSC has been writing deceptive after deceptive post, sometimes with clear error, but other times reporting facts that SSC would reasonably know, if he were careful, would mislead.

(Fact, presented out of context, can be highly misleading. Rossi often used this in his legal arguments in Miami. Partial truth can be perjury, distinct  from “the whole truth.”)

Here is one from just an hour ago:

SSC wrote:

Shane D. wrote:

I am pretty impressed with TD’s comments Abd so kindly provided. He sounds sincere, and truly committed to the humanitarian first, money second aspect in his search for a working LENR tech. Definitely at odds with the unflattering picture IH haters here painted. By their depiction, the “greedy bastard” should have pulled his money out of LENR by now, and gone back to real estate. Instead, he is continuing on with his LENR quest. Good on him!

You base your judgment on the words that Darden said, while his detractors are based on the facts.

He is lying; if he believes what he wrote, he is being without caution in repeating the deceptive claims of others, so he can earn the reward of those who lie.

Darden can tell all the fables he wants, he can say that his first thought when he wakes up every morning is to save the world and he can even tell you that money does not matter to him. But are you really willing to believe him? Did you read the Cherokee – Zeneca case?

I certainly have. I have researched it in detail. First of all, as is common in the Cherokee libels, there is no discrimination between Darden and Cherokee Investment Partners and the various LLCs that are created for specific projects.

I will not be checking every fact alleged by SSC, but most of this appears factual; however, it simply does not show what he is claiming. What, in fact, is he claiming, exactly? He is presenting facts about this case as if they reflect on Darden’s sincerity. How? Continue reading “Lying with facts”

Who won?

Color mind boggled. “Winning” is generally a highly subjective judgment, unless there are clear standards, which, in this matter, there are not. Someone may claim that the issue is clear, by either proposing or assuming a specific standard, which is, in this case, post-facto. The “case,” is, of course, Who Won in Rossi v. Darden? or Who Won by Reaching Settlement?

Frank Acland started a poll on E-Cat World. Poll: Rossi v. IH Settlement — Who Won?

The announcement refers to a discussion on the Vortex mailing list. I’ll get to that. On-line discussion groups have long ignored the processes of deliberative democracy. A question is asked, sometimes, but the exact form of the question is well-known to have a massive influence on answers. A question is asked and then people answer it, often arguing for their answer. Very normal in on-line fora. Continue reading “Who won?”

Following the flow of FUD

More FUD is appearing relating to Cherokee Investment Partners. This page will collect it.

On LENR Forum, SSC has written extensive nonsense about alleged Cherokee misrepresentations on an SEC form filed earlier this year, and Sifferkoll also covered this.

What these claims are actually demonstrating is major ignorance about business, and especially corporate business. They don’t tunderstand what they read, but cite it as proof of something or other. See the page linked for citations and details.

I have claimed that some kinds of posting, with reckless disregard for fact, is trolling, even if “sincere.” The claims have no purpose any more, other than simply continuing the basic theme of trolls: “I’m right, you are wrong.”

Speak of the devil

What ensues when we speak of the devil has long been expected. Problem with the devil: Qur’an: he speaks to you from where you do not recognize him.

I find a gloss for that obvious: he speaks through our friends and most of all through our own internal conversation, which most people have not learned to suspect is a pack of lies, in spite of ancient warnings about the self. (Actually, like the most skilled lies, it is mixed with a kind of truth, which helps it hide more effectively.)

So on LENR Forum, IH Fanboy has been writing a series of posts that continue his Rossi Good IH Bad theme. IHFB is remarkable. Before the trial, he was expecting that IH would unfortunately kick Rossi’s ass because of all the Rossi “mistakes” — or we could just say “lies.” Juries don’t like lies. It’s a simple story to communicate. if there is probative evidence. Continue reading “Speak of the devil”