This is a message to Peter Gluck as a response to https://egooutpeters.blogspot.com/2018/03/
It was suggested to me by a well-known scientist that your blog should be preserved as an important part of LENR history, and I agreed, so I am at this point downloading the entire site. Much (not all) of is on the Internet Archive. Meanwhile you have asked for updates.
Nothing is certain regarding LENR-technology, even that it does NOT exist.
“Certain” is a human reaction, which can be individual or social. Human memory and analysis can always be flawed. The Richard Garwin argument (“They must be making some mistake.”) is a default hypothesis whenever strong beliefs are challenged, and this can never be completely proven to be incorrect. However, routinely, we do accept preponderance of the evidence conclusions.
But, again, who is “we”? People who have a strong belief that “LENR” — what is that? — is “impossible,” will generally put little time into studying the evidence. But some will put in that time. What we know most certainly about so-called “cold fusion,” I continue to assert, is that in the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, deuterium is being converted to helium, with very little else happening at substantial levels. This is very different from claiming that PdD is the energy solution of the future.
This obviously tells us nothing, either way, about NiH.
I am desperate.
I’ve always been sorry to hear that. It’s painful to be desperate. Desperation creates poor decisions, only rarely, in true emergencies, is it useful.
And that’s how I’d encourage you to think, about “useful and not-useful,” instead of right and wrong and good and bad. Yes, there is some element of “good” in “useful,” as long as we remain in the realm of choice.
So far, LENR is not useful, except for investigation, and that is why patents that claim usefulness for energy production are rejected (in the US). They are not actually useful for that when independently tested, so far, it is potential, not realization. We often think of ideas being patentable, and yes, sometimes, but not if there is doubt, then usefulness for stated purpose must be shown.
Rossi got his US patent by not claiming any nuclear reaction, the patent was for a “fluid heater,” and nobody doubts that the Doral reactor heated water. But how much? Rossi did not make claims about that in his patent application, so they did not demand proof.
Other patents have been granted that actually claim LENR, the SPAWAR patent is one. It makes no energy claim, only particle production (including neutrons). There is another granted patent for an electrolytic method for investigating the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect! It does not claim use for creating energy, but for testing claims of such creation. That’s useful!
The Miamy Trial – Rossi vs. Darden is a complete mistery, but it seems Rossi has not lost the trial.
It’s not a mystery to someone who has studied the documents. I compiled all of them and created study guides, etc. and my personal full trust is in reality, not in the ideas of people including myself. Out of that, I do have opinions, but hopefully rooted strongly in evidence, as if I were a member of that jury, and I was there and saw the jury selection and opening arguments, already being very familiar with the evidence that had been revealed in depositions (sworn testimony) and pleadings.
A summary:
On many, many occasions, Rossi lied.
That is, he made statements and acted in ways clearly designed to create false impressions.
He lied to Industrial Heat about the Hydro Fusion test — that he deliberately failed that test to deceive Hydro Fusion into walking away from their agreement — or he lied to IH about his purpose. There are many small deceptions, often passed off by his supporters as simple hyperbole and style, but, he created and confirmed in many ways the impression to IH, including in emails, where it was quite clear, that his customer in Doral was Johnson-Matthey. When Vaugh wrote him that he was going to visit JM in England, Rossi quickly said, “No, they don’t want to be known, I should not have mentioned them. Your customer is a Florida company.” or like that.
The Florida company was a blind trust created by Rossi’s attorney, Johnson, who was also President of Leonardo Corporation. It was owned by a friend of Rossi, on paper. Rossi actually paid for everything and totally controlled the “customer.” The customer was not at all independent, as Rossi had claimed many times, to IH, and to the world on his blog.
Rossi and Johnson met with IH in North Carolina and signed the Terms Sheet covering the sale of power to JM Chemical Products. The name was obviously designed to resemble Johnson-Matthey, and Johnson represented that JM Products was an “English entity.” Since it was obviously not (Rossi was forced to reveal, from court process, the true owner), later, in depositions, Johnson claimed that they intended to create an English entity, but it was too expensive, so they didn’t. That is, Johnson — entirely working for Rossi — lied, claiming as fact, for legal purposes, what was only an idea, in order to promote the deception of an independent customer.
Rossi later claimed that he never told them that the customer was Johnson Matthey, but it’s very clear that he created that impression, and his fake JM engineer (Bass) clearly believed that he was actually working for Johnson Matthey, this was in emails revealed in the case.
So, then, there is a background of lies, and this actually goes way back. (I learned a lot more at ICCF-21 about his thermoelectric generators) However, some people don’t care about lying, if the liar delivers what they want, and we want cheap energy, right?
So Rossi set up and controlled what he later called a “test” of the 1 MW reactor assemblies, and his friend Penon issued a report showing a megawatt generated, thus providing what Rossi claimed would trigger an $89 million payment.
(There are many deceptions in the case. The agreement allowing the test to be postponed was never actually executed, the approval was required of Rossi’s long-time friends and partners, at Ampenergo, but they never agreed to it, and that was deliberate, not merely an accident as I thought it might have been. Rossi knew this, so he obviously tried to set up something to resemble a test and then to claim that he was still owed the money (and that they had set out to defraud him from the beginning and never had any intention to pay, and then he argued that they didn’t have the money to pay, and he argued many things that don’t match the evidence. They were well prepared to pay if the results had been good.)
But the kicker, of greatest interest, is that Rossi had failed to provide adequate ventilation to dissipate a megawatt of heat, 24/7. His own expert testified that without a heat exchanger, the warehouse would have been fatally hot. After having been asked about this in 2016, and having written on his blog that the heat was dissipated by an “endothermic reaction,” and then claiming that the roof vent was enough, and opening the back door, he, as discovery was ending, more or less last-minute, claimed he had built a heat exchanger on the second floor of the warehouse. In that, he crossed from deceptive interpretation into perjury, lying under oath, which is criminal. I won’t go into all the details, but, the jury would have agreed there was no heat exchanger and there was no evidence that it ever existed, for it would have been very visible and very noisy and many people had visited. You have to move a lot of air to dissipate a megawatt by air cooling!
So if this case did not settle, the possibility became high that Rossi could be prosecuted for perjury. He could go to jail again. At the same time, IH was not going to recover the $11.5 million they had given him, even if he had defrauded IH with the Validation Test in Italy. They had formally accepted that, even though they knew there were problems. However, they could have recovered a few million dollars in damages from the fraudulent customer and fake test (and they could also have collected from the co-conspirators, Johnson, as well as, with various degrees of culpability, Fabiani, Penon, and Bass. It is questionable that they could have recovered their legal expenses, and, as a technology company, needing to create confidence in inventors, they would not want the appearance of attempting to punish an inventor when things don’t work out. They had not sued Rossi, they had not attempted to expose him, and only counterclaimed when sued.
I think Rossi believed they would settle, but that was a bridge too far for them, given that he had essentially cheated them out of millions of dollars. Because of his legal expenses, Rossi was facing the likelihood of bankruptcy, and some of his friends might have also been bankrupted.
I was there when, as Rossi’s attorneys were setting up displays for the jury, the actual trial was about to begin, Rossi’s new attorney asked to confer with the lead attorney for IH. It was obvious what was happening. Rossi had been convinced to abandon the lawsuit, and the settlement agreement abandoned all claims of the parties against each other. Rossi had filed a federal lawsuit costing many millions of dollars, and was walking away with only one thing. I’m sure that attorney knew what to say to IH: “You are claiming the technology is worthless, so it would make sense that you would abandon it.
That agreement was used later by Rossi to claim that this is what he’d wanted all along, to get out of the agreement with IH, but, in fact, IH had not been preventing Rossi from developing and selling his technology around the world. He has also being deceptive about the agreement and IH behavior.
IH would not have been able to prove there was no excess heat. Their own testing, they testified under oath, had found nothing that did not turn out to be a measurement error. And, again, Peter, I could go on and on. But, bottom line, Rossi did not win his lawsuit and he lost many millions of dollars in legal costs, and no sane investor will put money into Rossi technology any more without taking extraordinary precautions, because there are many clear facts in the case that became public record. I’d call that a loss.
What will bring the future to LENR?
The future will bring itself, in its time, and desperately wanting something only hastens it, sometimes, when we are children, and our parents want to please us. Desperation does not generally serve adults, unless their lives are under immediate threat. Then it may motivate us to do difficult things, but complaining isn’t one of them, unless created and directed so as to effective. Desperation may delay the future when it leads us into useless activity, when smarter activity might carry the day.
In this blog I have told many times what I think about Pd/D and Ni/H etc., and I have not changed my opinion.
Don’t confuse me with facts?
Peter, you were always right, in my judgment, in certain ways, but you confused and did not understand other ways of looking at the situation. PdD is very unlikely to become a practical energy source, except maybe for special applications (such as space flight, and the SPAWAR patent I mentioned is of possible utility in a hybrid fusion/fission reactor being studied by Larry Forsley, Pam Boss, and others, working with NASA. Briefly, LENR (PdD!) is used to generate neutrons which then cause fission in associated uranium 238.
Now, is NiH viable? If so, it has very obvious advantages. At ICCF-21, there was a report from Takahashi about a collaboration where NiH is being intensively investigated, by a number of research groups, with more careful study of the effect of controlled variations than I have seen before. They are reporting XP in the 10 watt range, with some level of consistency.
What have we to do? Is any hope lost?
False hopes must always be lost. The only safety is in trusting reality no matter what. We are going to die, that comes to all of us. I have hope that LENR will be accepted as real in my lifetime, and, indeed, I hope to be able to personally help with this transformation in public understanding. I have less hope that practical applications will exist before I pass on, and even less hope that LENR will be “understood” in that time. If these things don’t happen, however, it does not distress me.
My stand is for real science and, as well, functional social process, but, again, my full trust and hope is in reality: reality is, as I wrote above, better than I can imagine. That is not a specific vision, it’s a declaration, a way of looking at the future, and I highly recommend it. It will not make things worse, particularly if you can recognize that “better” is a fantasy.
Peter, I hope you can find a way to come to terms with the reality of your life. “Reality” is not “good” or “bad.” It is largely what we say it is, as to those impressions. Reality itself doesn’t care about our opinions, those are froth, not substantial. Some think that Reality doesn’t care about us, but that is yet another opinion, and the only reasonably objective standard for judging opinions is whether or not they are useful.
From another post, one more question from Peter:
I also see that it [ICCF-21} is not organized by Darden – why?
At ICCF-20, Industrial Heat had agreed to support ICCF-21, to be held in North Carolina. However, as Rossi v. Darden was heating up, they decided that they could not maintain that commitment. David Nagel and Steve Katinsky took on the organizational task, and IH did support them. Darden was the keynote speaker. Industrial Heat is still actively supporting LENR research. So the Conference was held in Fort Collins, Colorado, on the campus of Colorado State University. ICCF-22 is planned to be in Slovenia, organized by Bill Collis.