Berkeley, California is a "nuclear free zone" as the many signs scattered around the city will announce to those that enter. I guess this machine will not be allowed for sale here.
Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#12What I find amusing about this is the fact there willing to turn these things on in an unshielded environment demonstrates they know it will fail. 1MW of the cleanest fusion we know about would still kill everyone in a large room before you could blink. PS: If it's enough power to heat a cup of coffee you needed serious shielding.
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Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#13> Many skeptics were left unconvinced. But the customer that the E-Cat was being tested for—which Wired UK says was rumored to be the US military's DARPA—was satisfied, and purchased the unit.
This doesn't mean that DARPA is not a sceptic. It means the unit has passed the simplest test of "not a cardboard box covered in tin foil with a guy going 'Beep Boop' next to it". Now DARPA can buy a single unit and tear it apart to see if there's anything interesting there.
A £1m gamble on interesting is not much for military budgets. I don't think I'd have spent the money - it feels like a scam or a sad delusion - but maybe there's some interesting chemistry even if cold fusion isn't there.
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#14I remember watching the first E-cat "test". This is one of those things that is either an incredible breakthrough or a "the bigger the lie" type scam. The key thing to remember is that Rossi is not doing this to advance some scientific field, but to invent a product for commercial sale. To that end, any tests or data they release is not intended for rigorous scientific review, but to convince potential customers that…
What i wonder about is how this scam holds for so long being so easy to test. You attach a simple electricity meter to this and run a lightbulb for a couple weeks, and when you reach the energy spent per unit of device's mass akin to gasoline (say 10 KWh/kg), you are onto something real.
Maybe you should read the paper conducting exactly such tests, where researchers concluded the energy density is at least one magnitude above conventional sources.
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#15Hacker News + science is often a very bad mix. Any evidence this is actually a fusion device, not a chemical energy converter or a brick?
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#16Seems like people with the appropriate qualifications have their doubts about this machine. [0] [1]
[0] http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/05/tommaso-dorigo-impressed-b... [1] http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat...
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#17If Rossi had a device that actually worked as advertised, the first thing he would do would be to set up multiple peer-reviewed demonstrations that would prove his claims in an undebatable way. As soon as incontrovertible evidence was provided, Rossi would become a media superstar, make history, and receive billions in pre-orders from all over the world. And if the physics was on Rossi's side, it would be very easy for him to provide the "extraordinary evidence" required by his extraordinary claims.
But years have passed and the validity of the E-Cat is still an open question. There have been some demonstrations, but results are still very much under discussion. There is no undebatable experimental evidence that the device works as advertised. So either Rossi prefers mystery over fame and billions, or the E-Cat a scam in some form or another.
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#18It might be interesting to know that Andrea Rossi has a history with "breakthrough" discoveries and inventions.
His former company Petroldragon was disbanded after they dumped over 70.000 tons of toxic waste (and probably their method of recycling oil didn't work at all).[1 -wikipedia][2- italian source].
Most of the tests that were done violated very basic scientific rules and can be considered demonstration more than anything. The paper on arxiv.org was done by a scientist who was very close to Rossi (Giuseppe Levi) and some of its methods are questionable according to [3 - german] and [4- shorter/incomplete English version].
A real independent proof of the claims made by Rossi is still to be delivered.
While I hope that Andrea Rossi has found the next BIG thing and that he is just paranoid and incredibly bad at communicating, I seriously doubt it and go with "It's a big scam" for now. With some luck history will prove me wrong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_%28entrepreneur%29 [2] http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2004/novembre/27/Riciclag... [3] http://www.psiram.com/ge/index.php/Focardi-Rossi-Energiekata... [4] http://www.psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Cata...
EDIT: Typos (at least the worst ones)
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#19FWIW, I did my own research about 2 years ago on this mysterious e-cat device, and I found out there is a surprisingly rich history of unexplained effects in nickel-hydrogen systems: heat that cannot be explained by theory. I am almost convinced Rossi and the few other (competing) scientists who are studying this effect are onto something HUGE. See my post: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 Unfortunately the scientific c…
Scientific community would love to test his claims, except he didn't (or couldn't) tell exactly how it works.
I understand that if he actually discovered something that HUGE, he wouldn't want to tell anybody, I know I wouldn't.
But please, don't blame it on "scientific community", that's what conspiracy theorists morons say.
Re: Preorder your very own cold fusion reactor
#20The article says that the exact nature of the reaction (e.g. the catalyzer used) remain secret. At the same time, Wikipedia claims that an Italian patent was granted for E-Cat.
However, isn't the point of the patent system that the discoveries are made public? Does this mean, since the catalyzer was apparently not patented, that someone could (independently invent and) patent it instead? Or do I understand patents and law in a wrong way?