Let's just say that I did enough research that I am now convinced that the E-Cat device is not only possible, but likely very real. Read everything, especially the site of Christopher Calder that I submitted as another entry because it is worth it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176820
I would think this would be on the "front page" of every media outlet by now. It would rival the announcement of the potential aids vaccine. OWS folks would be playing it up as the beginning of the end of the Evil Corporations.
Instead, silence.
I consider it very unlikely that the experiment was a success. So that leave two possibilities: 1). Deliberate fraud, a la Madoff. Or 2). interesting science, not fusion, but still a reaction that is not well understood. Something like a fuel cell, when for a while it looks like e_out > e_in, but in reality e_in happened over a long time, and as such the reaction is non-sustainable.
I'm hoping for 2)- an honest mistake in which we learn something.
While it's right to be skeptical, it's worth considering that the press has been burned by cold fusion claims many times by now.
No serious journalist would touch this without a ton of caveats, and then what's the point? So a lack of massive mainstream media coverage doesn't really mean all that much.
Especially given that these guys seems to be secretive, which is understandable whether or not it's real or a scam - if the process is easy to reproduce, and claims are that the process is very simple, and thus if the effect is real they're probably worried about someone copying it and finding simple ways around any patents they might apply for.
Of course the second reason to be secretive would be if it blatantly is a scam or they have failed to make it work and refuse to accept that they won't find a way to fix it.
And history is littered by companies like this that claimed to have similar stuff for all kinds of reason and then just fell off the radar after it turned out they were frauds, wrong or delusional...
Personally, I no longer think "is this true?" when reading about stuff like this. I know that the odds are in favor of this being another fake technology. What I do think about is whether there is any mechanism for real inventions to become acknowledged in this kind of environment. Would Nikola Tesla be considered a fake these days? Did he have good documentation for his devices? How did his public demonstrations go?
Initially Tesla would be viewed with skepticism. But his work with AC was reproducible. His anti-gravity experiments are not accepted.
An interesting contemporary thread currently is the inflationary expansion of the universe that was reported a couple of years back
(http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/334907/title/Cosm...). It was a remarkably unsettling find, yet seems to be confirmed other teams. If it's not true we will learn something truly fundamental (like h-bar isn't really constant or something).
Well, Rossi could very easily be acknowledged by just giving a few grand and a prototype to some independent lab for testing. He hasn't done this, therefore I feel fine dismissing this as a fake.
This is very likely to be a scam. The guy is just delusional and trying to get financing to make it work because it probably doesn't work at all. Why don't they visibly disconnect the generators? why don't they allow anyone to verify that new elements have been created inside the fusion modules? why all the secrecy and only letting reporters go in for a few minutes during the test? They've been publishing their bullshit papers since the mid-90s. If this was for real, reproducible and all, somebody else would have verified it by now.
"The guy is just delusional and trying to get financing to make it work because it probably doesn't work at all."
This has been my litmus test for years for the free/excess energy folks. One of the things that has always been true is that if you have energy, even in small amounts, which is 'free' you can sell that energy for 'money'. In developed countries this is trivial, run the power meter backwards at your house/business, less so at less developed countries although I was at a talk by the guy who built a windmill generator in Africa and he charged batteries for a fee with it.
So you work at a 'real' job for a while and use your savings to build energy machines, you start ganging them together and you sell their energy, once they are making enough money to pay your bills plus a bit of working capital you start building them full time. Once they provide enough funding for V2 you start working on that.
If its real there is no requirement to raise money, if its a scam, well the money is the point.
The area where this gets a bit weirder is with the actual fusion guys. They want to raise money to do basic research with the promise of offering you a piece of the action if they succeed. This isn't exactly a scam, but its definitely very speculative. The focus fusion guys come under this umbrella. They have math that says it works, but they don't know how to build the gear yet, hence the speculation.
They discovered results consistent with Focardi et al.: excess heat around the nickel bar and hydrogen absorption. However they also placed an additional temperature sensor on the container of the cell which was unable to measure any significant excess heat. They theorize that the nickel bar is prone to local variations of its thermal characteristics, correlated to the phenomenon of hydrogen absorption. They concede that hydrogen absorption remains unexplained.
Then Focardi took this feedback into account and wrote the 1998 paper which I linked above.
But the stigma attached to cold fusion did entice researchers to have a 2nd look at this later paper. Some of the scientists interviewed on October 28, 2011 for the test admit that they had never read about hydrogen-nickel fusion until 2011. You can bet that from now on, many are starting to look into it...
AFAIK, there are government regulations about nuclear experiments they would trigger if there was a big audience, so they showed the machine to 1-2 people at a time as a workaround.
Everything I read about the E-Cat sounds fishy to me. Especially the latest experiment - so the output is 480kW, and there is a 500kW generator connected, but supposedly not operating? What a coincidence!
People want this to be true so I can understand the reporting but come on, this is just not real.
I'm kinda always falling for free energy stories because they appeal to my hopes. Rationally, I know it doesn't work and my brain keeps telling me it's a scam. In my gut, however, I dream of a world where free energy reigns and we don't have to burn fossil fuel en masse just to keep society afloat.
However, lately I wondered: Would free energy really be a good thing? If there's limitless energy for everybody, wouldnt it be even easier for a lunatic - or a government run by lunatics - to run amok. Economically and Ecologically, it would be terrific. But I wonder if we, as a species, are already adolescent enough to be given such power.
Free energy appeals to the dream to keep up the historic trend of human expansion, using more and more energy. It could prevent a lot of struggles in this century.
However I somehow feel it isn't going to be this easy.
If this were a real breakthrough, we would be seeing a trickle of confirmations followed shortly by a flood of news and immensely stepped-up activity.
I'm impressed by Focardi, however. Not because he can make energy from nothing (I triple-dare say he can't). Making money from nothing, however, doesn't violate any physical laws and this guy seems to have that talent although it is probably a "once-in-a-lifetime" trick.
Has there been any progress since, is the question ... googling around I find a lot of press-release type material breathlessly translated into English but not much else ... surely, by now, someone has been able to measure the copper isotopes produced and at least take a stab at a theory ...
I wondered if nickel fuses in a supernova - a bit of browsing shows that it is apparently one of the main seeds for creation of heavier elements through neutron capture:
No. It's a free energy scam. It will go away and in a couple years another scam will bubble up against all odds and make it into mainstream media. Call it zero-point quantum energy, call it magnetism, cold fusion, free energy by any other name.
Research the people, not the techno babble. If they don't submit to independent scientific scrutiny and approach ignorant investors individually, well there you go.
Let's just say that I did enough research that I am now convinced that the E-Cat device is not only possible, but likely very real. Read everything, especially the site of Christopher Calder that I submitted as another entry because it is worth it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176820