This machine (and all previous ones) are super easy and cheap to fake. When he switched his remote control, a valve in the reactor could have opened, dripping water on aluminium power (with some NaOH as catalyzer). OR a valve added H2O2 to the secondary feed. OR a induction oven in another room powered up. OR his USB thermometer startet to give higher readings (easy to hack). OR the thermocouples were influenced. OR a valve diverted water from the secondary input to the primary output. He does not even need a RC, a bimetal switch as in any decades-old thermostate would do, too. This whole thread is full of examples. Those "critical experts" are in front of your nose. Note that i.e. Mats Lewans can not be too critical of Rossis shows, otherwise he will be called a snake and eventually not get invited anymore, like Krivit (although this might be something good, because Rossi would be forced to do a proper demonstration - or never to be heard again if he can not).
If you say something like "elaborate machine with so many parts and expenses involved", I wonder whether we are talking about the same thing. All I see is a taped together piece of rusty junk metal. Compare that to those amateur polywell projects, they are an order of magnitude more complicated, everything looks shiny and proper, and they obviously did NOT cost "a house". I see this as an good example for how much believes can change ones perception of reality.
Ok, you do have some valid points there and then you dont.
When I am talking about the complexity of a scam, I am NOT necessarily talking about the machine allone. From an engineering POV it may not be that complex, but from a scam POV it is.
There are way easier ways to scam money out of people, with a much smaller risk of getting cought. Look at all the successful scams out there and how simple they were in comparison. Look at Wallstreet and all the banks that are so successfully scamming money out of our governments, just for an example.
You will definitely not choose a field that is already highly desputed and therefore suspicious and then invite so many scientists to critically (even though sloppily) inspect your device. It seems incredibly counter productive. If it was a scam, he would have just come up with some excuse for why the demonstration would not happen that day. You know the delay tactics.
Self dilusion is probable for the majority of LENR researchers, but certainly not for Rossi. I cannot imagine he had his nose over this thing, claiming O/I ratios of over 100, self sustained mode etc., for years and not realizing that there is not more output than input.
Again, this is not very credible for a scam. If I was to make a scam, it would definitely look like it would produce WAAAAAY more energy than it consumes. You said yourself that it is easy to fake.
The whole enrichment story is another example, either he has developed a new form of enrichment, or he has not. Of course he has not, he could have made money out of this a long time ago. It needs a lot of skills in physics, which someone who does not understand the problems of calometry FOR MORE THAN 6 TIMES IN A ROW, declining the offered help, and claiming a lot of other nonsense, does not have.
Yeah, that is something that I am still very confused about as well and one of the reasons why a scam is still a possibility for me.
To all likelihood, it costs many 100s of millions for the required amounts of nickel (at the same time he claims that electricity would cost less than 1 ct/kWh, of which the catalyzer is only a small part), and can hardly have gone unnoticed (think of nuclear weapons). Of course, the claim for enrichment only came up when someone stood up and asked "isn't it a bit strange that the copper produced has perfectly natural isotope ratios?". For some reason, this did not ring a bell in believers like Kiteman, who defended this absurd thesis.
Also a good argument and why I think that if this device works (as I said, 50:50), we have not seen a credible theory yet as to why it does.
On a side note: I do not see LENR as pessimistic as the ecat, though it's unlikely. In fact, LENR DOES take place in any metal hydride, but to an amount that is not practical (and this process DOES emit beta/gamma radiation, contrary to what Rossi says). I would not be surprised if it never gets feasible at all. Tomclarke explained well why.
I am just as pessimistic about LENR now as I am about the ecat. I used to be more pesimistic about the ecat, but the latest demonstration kinda reduced the likeliness of a scam for me. Before, I had the easy explanation that Levi was simply in on the scam. Now, I am not so sure anymore. There are to many factors now that would have been very hard for Rossi to control. It would have been enough for one of the experts there to touch the metal connection of the heat exchanger, e.g. to notice that it was too hot and that the heat would have affected measurements.
They were allowed to inspect things rather freely from what I understand (only exception being the inside of the black box).
After all they were there for an entire day. I seriously hope they all did not just stand there in awe for 12 hours watching the ecat boil (not not boil, depending on which side of the fence you are on).
With a demonstration like this, that was this long, the risk of discovery would have been very high.
