bcglorf wrote:... So you'd have no problem with a guy manufacturing and selling a cure for cancer without any proof it actually works? There is most certainly a large enough market of dying people, desperate enough to be suckered into buying a well marketed placebo.
Can you explain why Rossi deserves the time of day from anyone?
Since you are in metaphors;
You know, every times I hear about a disruptive idea, I think about this King in his tent, preparing for a battle with swords, bows and arrows. A salesman show’s up with a riffles and bullets. The king send him on it’s way, He has no time to talk about toys.
Throughout my short career (about 30 years) I have met many inventors of very disruptive technologies ( Dr. Gerard O’Neal inventing GPS, Dr. Bussard inventing the Polywell, Dr. Jim Benson promoting the capture of Asteroids, to name a few …) I think all of then died not long after publishing their results, before seeing their idea come to pass. Actually many of them died from cancer, so I do not like the snake oil scams. Some time however, you do get antivenin from snakes! It is not easy to distinguish it from snake oil.
The nickel-hydrogen invention that Rossi came up with is at risk. At this time, there might not be enough people knowing the secret to protect it if Rossi disappears. I do not know if this is a scam. If it is a scam, I am quite sure he will pay dearly for it eventually. However, it might not be a scam, you must accept this fact. We should not throw him out of the tent because we are preparing for the energy war.
Here is an other concept to wrap your mind around.
I can calculate the orbital speed of a spacecraft using Euclid geometry. I do not need derivative nor special math. So, why is it that it took over 2000 years, until Newton to figure it out. Newton invented the math required to really understand what was going on, because he needed it to solve his gravity model accurately. The concept of orbital speed came to him before he needed the math to calculate it, before he understood that something we call “gravity” was responsible. In Euclid time, they did not have the concept of orbital speed, so they never calculated it, but they could have.
What I am saying is that we do not have all the knowledge of everything. I do believe that many misteries are still hidden from our primitive science. So, do not throw away all your snake oil jars, you might get bitten by a snake one day, and need this one bottle of antivenin.
We can and should remain skeptic about these new ideas like the Rossi reactor, but you should not dismiss them so lightly just because it does not fit our understanding of the laws of physic. Proper investigation should be done, and over time, we will find out if it is real or not. At this current time, no one here has the necessary data to prove it does not work, so do not make wild claim of a scam unless you can prove it, and try to shut it down before it is proven either way. It take time and efforts to do proper science, and most of the time these efforts are waisted in wrong directions. Once in a while, you do get lucky, and get something totally unexpected.
Cheers,
jb