An Australian believer in Andrea Rossi’s “Energy Catalyzer” has failed to obtained money to acquire the Australian rights to Rossi’s device.
Solihin Millin
Solihin Millin, from Murwillumbah, Byron Bay, Australia, asked potential investors for money to acquire the Australian rights to Rossi’s device. One of the potential investors was Dick Smith, a successful Australian businessman and philanthropist. Millin asked him for AUS$200,000.
Smith had some doubts so he asked the Australian Skeptics Society to look into the merits of Rossi’s device. They had doubts, too, and warned Smith, who decided to pass on the opportunity.
Millin, in turn, threatened to sue Smith for damages of AUS$100 million because, according to Millin, he lost the time-sensitive opportunity to acquire the Australian E-Cat rights.
Millin runs an organization in Australia called Byron New Energy Charitable Trust, also known as the Byron New Energy Group. New Energy Times spoke with Millin on Feb. 1, but he declined to comment.
“The group has a goal of love and selfless service to humanity at large,” the group’s Web site said, “of researching, developing, publishing freely in the public domain for the good of humanity at large, and manufacturing devices that use clean renewable energy sources that supply viable alternatives to those devices that use non-environmentally friendly non-renewable fuels such as nuclear and fossil fuels. These devices will also help eliminate poverty and hardship around the world and bring prosperity and happiness to our wonderful human family.”
But the Byron New Energy Group just needed some money. So on Dec. 7, 2011, Millin asked Smith for AUS$200,000 to acquire the Australasian E-Cat license.
“Cold fusion is now a commercial reality,” Millin wrote, “and will replace dirty fossil fuel, coal, oil and gas AND deadly Uranium as the World’s new Clean Green Power. This is a highly lucrative trillion-dollar market opportunity. Byron New Energy Charitable Trust is set to acquire the exclusive Australasian E-Cat Cold Fusion License from Andrea Rossi in Italy.
“Rossi’s cold fusion is a commercial reality with 14 one-megawatt plants already sold in the USA and Europe to groups such as NASA and DARPA and commercial companies. We have been negotiating with Andrea Rossi for many months, and the contracts have been agreed, and I am scheduled to fly to Bologna, Italy, to sign the agreement and pay the license fee. We need the $200K risk capital to enable this.”
On or about Dec. 8, 2011, Millin sent Smith another e-mail, along with the NASA slide presentations he obtained from the New Energy Times Web site.
“Here is independent evidence from three of NASA’s senior scientists that Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat technology is real,” Millin wrote. “In fact, to the best of my understanding, one of the first sales that has already been made of the one-megawatt E-Cat is to NASA.”
Millin was mostly incorrect. As New Energy Times reported on Feb. 10, NASA did not buy and never had any intention of buying a device from Rossi. Of the three NASA presentations that Millin sent to Smith, only that of Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA Langley, implied that Rossi’s claim was real.
Michael A. Nelson, an engineer at NASA Marshall who investigates low-energy nuclear reactions and space applications, has been more circumspect. In his Sept. 22, 2011, presentation, Nelson publicly identified the key technical concerns about the Rossi device.
On July 14, 2011, Nelson met Rossi when he came to NASA Marshall to ask them to test and evaluate his device. Marshall accepted Rossi’s offer. The two parties began negotiating details of the test protocol. NASA asked for a test that avoided phase change of water into steam because steam would introduce unnecessary confusion to the test. A few days later, Rossi withdrew his offer.
In Millin’s December e-mail, he explained his intentions further to Smith.
“All we need is $200K initial risk capital from yourself to secure the Australasian exclusive license,” Millin said. “Dear Andrea Rossi is waiting for Byron New Energy to obtain the funding. We have built up a very good relationship with dear Andrea, and I believe he likes BNE’s honesty and humanitarian values, as well as our commercially oriented market strategy.
“There is plenty of money for everyone. This is an opportunity not only to make large amounts of money but also to be part of the introduction of new clean green technology for our beautiful planet and our peoples and to alleviate poverty. Love and peace, Solihin Millin.”
On Dec. 12, 2011, Smith sent an e-mail to Tim Mendham, the executive officer and editor for the Australian Skeptics society.
“I recently received the following email from Solihin Millin,” Smith wrote. “He wants a mere $200,000 from me for the Byron New Energy Charitable Trust to invest in cold fusion. Normally, of course, I would just write out my cheque for $200,000 and send it off. However, I thought there was just the slightest chance that it’s a con or someone is being deluded. Do you know anything about them?”
Mendham contacted Ian Bryce, an aerospace engineer and member of the society who has extensive experience in testing unusual physics-engineering devices. Mendham asked Bryce to look into the matter.
During the next 30 days, Bryce studied the available information and found serious problems, according to an e-mail he sent to New Energy Times.
“By Jan. 8, I set down my tentative observations and conclusions about Rossi’s E-Cat. I reported to Smith that many scientists and observers had given varying degrees of support to Rossi’s E-Cat because the measurements showed large power gains,” Bryce wrote. “I could not explain this. However, there were too many bad signs for it to be real.”
Millin had been impressed by the confidence placed in Rossi’s device by two Swedish professors: Sven Kullander, professor emeritus at Uppsala University, and Hanno Essén, associate professor of theoretical physics and a lecturer at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and the former chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Association.
Kullander and Essén endorsed Rossi’s extraordinary excess-heat claim in a news story on Feb. 23, 2011, before they had inspected or seen Rossi’s device.
On March 29, 2011, after they told the public it must embrace the Rossi claim, they went to Bologna, Italy, expenses paid by Rossi, to see a demonstration of Rossi’s device and inspect it. They wrote up their report on April 3, 2011.
“Any chemical process for producing 25 kWh from any fuel in a 50 cm^3 container can be ruled out,” the professors wrote. “The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.”
Unfortunately, the professors didn’t think about how Rossi could be flushing water down the hole in the wall rather than turning it into steam. The professors never thought to ask the obvious disturbing question, “Hey, where’s the huge steam output?”
“Since there was no other path for the water than straight through the device in a single hose-pipe-hose track, we concluded that all the water must become steam,” Essén wrote. “The steam was checked by observation and appeared to be consistent with the water flow (order-of-magnitude-wise).”
As New Energy Times reported six months ago, when liquid water turns into vaporized water (steam), it expands volumetrically 1,600 times. And when the professors saw tiny puffs of steam instead, they didn’t think about the fact that it should have been coming out at 1,600 times the volume of the water going in.
New Energy Times spoke with Essén on July 15, 2011 and asked him whether, when he pulled the hose out of the wall and saw the steam, he thought about the expansion rate.
“No, I must admit, I was thinking that I must check that the water is not draining out,” Essén said. “I had this vague feeling that the water inlet flow wasn’t that fast, that the steam could be consistent with it, especially after some condensation in the hose. But we should have looked more into that, obviously, but there was not enough time.”
When Rossi told them he hired an expert to measure the steam, the professors never imagined that Rossi’s expert had used a device that was not designed to measure steam. But, anyway, that’s not Millin’s fault.
On Dec. 22, 2011, Millin sent the Kullander and Essén report to Smith, but Smith wasn’t convinced.
On Jan. 13, 2012, Millin held an investors’ meeting and began asking people for money for Rossi E-Cats. Smith asked Bryce to go to the meeting and give a presentation. According to Bryce, about 70 people attended.
Here are slides #4 and #6 from Millin’s presentation:
According to Millin, Rossi had arranged to attend the meeting over Skype, but Rossi failed to appear. As we went to press, Rossi had not denied any association with Millin. Here is a copy of Millin’s slide presentation.
Millin's Invitation to the E-Cat Investors' Meeting
“On this historic day, Friday, [Jan.] 13, 2012, the availability of Cold Fusion is announced to Australasia,” Millin said. “The Advent of Clean Green Renewable Inexpensive Energy as a replacement for Fossil Fuel, Oil, Gas, Fracking and URANIUM is here NOW. From this time, orders can be placed for Industrial and Commercial 1MW heating Units. Please see Sol Millin after this Meeting.”
The story about the investment meeting ran on Jan. 13 in the Sydney Morning Herald; an E-Cat Web site written by a ghostwriter plagiarized a lot of the Herald story and ran a similar story.
Bryce wasn’t convinced about the E-Cat, as he told New Energy Times.
“Nothing I learned at the meeting changed the doubts I had developed,” Bryce wrote. “The next morning, I reported to Smith and said there were too many bad signs causing doubt that the invention is real: Do not invest.”
Smith decided to pass on the investment opportunity. But for Millin, Smith’s decision was unsatisfactory.
On Jan. 16, Millin sent an e-mail to Smith and threatened to sue Smith for “damages” of AUS$100 million if Smith didn’t give him AUS$200,000 by the next day. According to Millin, this would have enabled him to acquire the Australasian E-Cat license, which apparently was a limited-time offer. Needless to say, Millin’s demand didn’t inspire Smith to share his wealth.
On Jan. 19, Bryce concluded that Rossi’s demonstrations had a potential loophole that would have allowed undetected power into the system. The Australian Skeptics Society issued a press release about this on Jan. 31.
“Bryce found that, in all six [publicized] tests up to July, a misconnected earth lead could funnel in up to 3 kilowatts, thus bypassing the power meters used, and accounting for all the measured output power in the form of steam. In all later tests, there was no valid power measurement due to poorly placed thermometers,” the society wrote.
Bryce may have been correct about the earth lead. New Energy Times cannot confirm this. However, Bryce gave more credence to Rossi’s claimed power gain than is appropriate. Rossi never directly measured the power output. He inferred it from a very weak set of assumptions and a few sporadic measurements of steam with the wrong tool.
New Energy Times has not taken the time to review Bryce’s idea because of what we saw and filmed on June 14 in Rossi’s presence. Our video shows that Rossi’s experiment was producing no more steam than an ordinary electric tea kettle and drawing an equivalent amount of power from the wall.
It also shows how Rossi had designed an obvious method to pass unvaporized water down a hole in the wall, thus making the water disappear, along with the credibility of his claim.
On Feb. 5, Millin sent a “final demand” to Smith. In his e-mail, Millin restated that he had fullfilled his side of the deal by providing the report from Kullander and Essén.
In this demand, Millin provided Smith with bank instructions to wire funds to Millin’s account and an attachment with an invoice from Rossi with bank account numbers and instructions to wire 100,000 Euro directly to Rossi’s Leonardo Corp. account.
Received via e-mail:
Dear Steven,
Thank you for your email.
I am reading it carefully to check for correctness and consistency.
A number of glaring important errors and mis-representations are in the paragraph:
‘On Jan. 13, 2012, Rossi held an investors’ meeting and began asking people for money for Rossi E-Cats. Smith asked Bryce to go to the meeting and give a presentation. According to Bryce, about 70 people attended. ‘
A. This was in no way an ‘investor’s’ meeting and there was absolutely no ‘asking people for money’. In fact it was explicitly stated more than twice by myself to the audience at large during the presentation that this was not an investor’s meeting or a fundraising meeting in any form or manner whatsoever. This meeting was called to inform the audience of the advent of Cold Fusion as a commercial reality and to indicate the potential opportunities for Australians and for the local Byron and Tweed Shire as a consequence.
B. I took the liberty to say in effect ‘you can place an order for a 1MW E-Cat now’, particularly to make it clear to the audience that the E-Cat is available for commercial sale. At the time of the meeting, I was negotiating the Exclusive Australasian E-Cat License with dear Andrea Rossi, and legally did not yet have Andrea Rossi’s permission or that of Leonardo Corporation to ask for orders.
C. Andrea Rossi had absolutely nothing to do with this meeting, other than being invited to discuss the E-Cat technology with the people attending the meeting via Skype. Andrea Rossi did accept this offer, however, due to a timing mis-understanding, was not available at the time of the meeting.
D. Andrea Rossi absolutely did not ask for any money or investment in any form or manner whatsover.
E. Nobody at the meeting, including myself who organised the meeting, asked for any investment, funds and/or money in any form whatsover.
It is most important that you edit this part of your story because it is absolutely false.
I will keep reading your article and will inform you in due course of any other in-accuracies I perceive from my point of view.
Love and peace,
Sol
Solihin Millin
Founder and Trustee
Byron New Energy Charitable Trust
http://www.byronnewenergy.com
Dear Sol,
The sentence “Rossi held an investors’ meeting and began asking people for money for Rossi E-Cats” is obviously a typo. It should have said “Millin held an investors’ meeting and began asking people for money for Rossi E-Cats.” I have corrected this immediately.
You declined to talk with me when I spoke with you on the phone on Jan. 31. You also stated “no comment” to my e-mail request on Feb. 1 and on Feb. 12, “As before, I have no comment.”
I gave you ample opportunity to comment and contribute to my understanding of this story before I wrote it and ran it.
When I look at your slides 4 and 6, I get the impression that you offered a 1Mw E-Cat for $1.5M plus taxes, duties, etcetera, a 10kw home unit for $400-$500, you were selling them with a full warranty, you were taking pre-orders, and people should see you after the meeting.
Love, peace and warm regards,
Steven
Dear Steven,
Be this as it may, I would suggest you change your text appropriately
to reflect the facts you now have in your possession, otherwise, in my
opinion, it may appear you may be in the business of dis-information
for your own reasons.
Love and peace,
Sol
Dear Sol,
Every word you have sent to me has been published, as is. But I won’t continue this back-and-forth with you forever. So if you have any further comments, statements or responses, please send them without delay.
Again, love and peace,
Steven
Dear Sol,
You seem to be confused about how journalism works. You don’t get to re-write a story after it publishes, least of all when you declined opportunities given to you to contribute in advance of the article publication.
As much as I’d like to continue the conversation with you, I do have to move on to other stories. I will look at and respond to one final e-mail from you within the next 24 hours, then we’re done.
Hopefully you will answer the two outstanding questions I asked you several hours ago.
Warm regards,
Steven
Dear Sol,
As I mentioned a moment ago, it’s a little late for you to respond to the news inquires I made several days ago, but still, I want to give you another opportunity to be understood.
In your announcement, it states, “Take part NOW in an amazing altruistic and potentially highly financially rewarding opportunity to introduce Cold Fusion to Australasia NOW.”
Can you please tell me in what way were you inviting people to “take part”?
Love, peace and warm regards,
Steven
Dear Sol,
Another question. You wrote “Andrea Rossi absolutely did not ask for any money or investment in any form or manner whatsover.”
Can you please explain the Leonardo Corporation invoice, complete with all of Rossi’s contact information, bank account information, created in an Italian version of a Word processor, for Euro 100,000 that you forwarded to Smith?
Love, peace and warm regards,
Steven
My long standing objection to Rossi’s work is that it does harm to other, genuine, trail-blazers in small-scale fusion research. We need small scale fusion research because it’s the big stuff that is pulling all the $research cash right now and after 60 years there’s no proof it is a practicable power source. Most research would give up after 10 years if their experimental objective could not be achieved. 60 is unprecedented in human history!
Rossi’s efforts are just feeding the mainstream with ammunition to reject anything except hot, big-bucket magnetic fusion. What Rossi has done has harmed real research and perpetuated a view that small-scale nuclear reactor research is ‘crack-pot’.
The corollary is that anyone giving public credence to Rossi without being in possession of emphatic proof, that passes due diligence criteria, is also causing actual harm to funding opportunities to small-scale research. Perhaps, then, “Byron New Energy Charitable Trust” [and other such publicly outspoken supporters without the required level of evidence] may, itself, become a target for legal claims in the future from bona-fide researchers losing out on funding grants?
Firstly, congratulations Steven Krivit on an excellent article. Your diligence shows.
However on the technical side, you have downplayed my earth wire hypothesis and instead promoted your own water/steam hypothesis. Consider all tests up to 29 April 2011 (of 10 and 3 KW E-CATS), which account for 7 of the 9 demonstrations with publicized results from independent observers.
True the E-CATS produced a mixture of steam and water at 100C. But even if there was minimal steam and mainly water raised from 18 to 100C as measured, the heat capacity (excluding heat of vaporization) demands an energy source. At the calibrated flow rate, the output power was around 2600 W for up to 6 hours, when the input power was measured to be zero. For power graphs from my analysis, see the supporting documents linked from the Skeptics press release at
http://www.skeptics.com.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Rossi-ECAT-press-release-Technical1.pdf
I will provide my spreadsheet and writeup if requested.
Only the earth wire hypothesis can account for those 7 tests with verifiable output power.
Funny, I am not feeling the love…
LOL! Good job!
I don’t think rewiring a power cord is a viable way to cheat because it is too easy to discover. Rossi probably cheated with the entrained water and perhaps with wet steam when he calculated the power output based on heat of evaporation of water. When he used a heat exchanger, he probably cheated with thermocouple placement and maybe with energy stored inside the device during preheating.
Mr Krivit,
I have followed this story from when it first broke in the Australian press. Whilst I do not always agree with your stories I am going to support you on this one in regard to Sol Millin and the event he ran at the local RSL at Mullumbimby.
Everything I saw and read led me to believe he was seeking investment. The papers here at the time all supported that view which was created by Sol when he publicized the story. The fact that he has stated he was after the Australian distribution rights further supports this view.
http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/news/national/national/general/mullumbimby-helping-to-save-world/2418684.aspx
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/mullumbimby-helping-to-save-world-20120112-1pxj2.html
http://rossigenerator.com/andrea-rossi/the-rossi-generator-may-be-redeemed-by-mullumbimby
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/dick-smith-slams-door-on-cold-fusion-invention/story-e6frg8y6-1226257712367
(google Mullumbimby Sol Millin for many more)
Some subsequent press on the Dick Smith involvement did appear to twist the facts by stating that Rossi had contacted Dick Smith when that was never apparent in the original stories published. Both Rossi and Smith have now corrected that incorrect reporting. Who was the source of that mis-information is known by the journalist that wrote the later story.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46342612/ns/technology_and_science-science/ (Go to “Missed Connections” heading for the mis-information).
In summary though, I believe you dealt fairly with Sol Millin and any problems he has are purely self inflicted.
Doug M (dsm)
“Millin provided Smith with bank instructions to wire funds to Millin’s account and an attachment with an invoice from Rossi with bank account numbers and instructions to wire 100,000 Euro directly to Rossi’s Leonardo Corp. account.” (link provided in article)
Congratulations on this amazing scoop. Examination of the invoice is potentially telling. First, it’s amateurish. If it was a high school project to design the document, the choice of fonts and spacing alone would flunk a high school student flat.
Then, the invoice is number 101 — the usual number which starts a new sequence of invoices. “1″ would look bad. But is this Rossi’s first invoice ever? What about the invoice numbers for the *14* megawatt plants he claims to be building for customers? Did he sell those multimillion dollar items on a hand shake? What about all the agreements to distribute he claims he already signed — for example with Ampenergo, a Swedish company, a German company and several others. Did they not get numbered invoices?
Note also that the license has no expiration date. Is this license in perpetuity? If so, the price of $131,000 for all of Australia is especially reasonable!
Rossi claims the sale of 14 “megawatt plants” for between $2.5 million and $1.5 million each. What an amazing bargain the distributorship for Australia is compared to those plants. I would give him that much for the chance to distribute E-cats just to a single small US city … if he could prove to me that it works, LOL.
Someone on the Vortex email list, an Alan J. Fletcher, suggested that the above means I think the invoice is a forgery. On the contrary. I think it’s real and it shows how desperate and crude Rossi is.
HOLY CRAP!
I have been wasted all my life WORKING for a living!
I should take a lesson from Andrea Rossi, Sol Millin or Greg Watson and just BULLSHIT for a living instead.
MUCH more profitable.
(and totally legal thanks to the ineptitude of ASIC and all the regulators in Australia)
Scamming pays BIG TIME!
AAAaaaaarrrgh!
Mary wrote: I don’t think rewiring a power cord is a viable way to cheat because it is too easy to discover.
NO, Rossi sat by the blue box for each test, and if anyone approached the metering, the “B” power controller could be turned off in an instant, making the earth current zero. The 29 April test shows a disappearance of excess power for 20m seconds.
Mary wrote: Rossi probably cheated with the entrained water and perhaps with wet steam when he calculated the power output based on heat of evaporation of water.
YES, but for all 7 tests up to April, there is STILL excess power out, in the range 1022-2900 W, when the measured input was only 300 W – see my list of tests linked from the press release. Thus the earth wire is definitely required to explain observations. I have asked Steven Krivit to make this correction to his article.
Sorry Ian. No test has been performed where excess heat has been directly measured in a scientifically correct manner. 200 pages on this in Report 3. Old news.
SBK
Ian,
It only takes 2% non vaporised water output to convert a COP of 6.37 to a COP of < 1. In every test I've seen there was water in the output. There probably never was any excess heat. Just a trick with numbers and telling everybody the water was 100% vaporised when it clearly was not.
Shaun
Rossi was repeatedly asked to do these things:
1. Use the electrical heater in a blanked E-cat (no hydrogen) to calibrate the measurement system to prove that it correctly accounted for and did not overestimate the amount of heat energy produced.
2. Sparge all the output steam by condensing it into an insulated contained allowing measurement of enthalphy by the temperature rise in the bath.
3. Repeat the experiment supposedly done by Dr. Levi in February of 2011 in which not only was there supposed to have been a surge of 130 kW of output power but also the method of measurement was liquid flow calorimetry with no steam. It was asked that this be repeated with proper documentation, calibration and a blank control run to test the thermocouple placement.
He refused. That strongly suggests that the measurement method is where he is cheating. You say he could turn off the heater if someone made a measurement properly on his power cord? That would be a very risky move because it would most likely be caught on video. Obviously, scammers avoid using methods that are likely to expose them. Again, I doubt that Rossi would use such a risky thing as manipulating the power cord when all he had to do with let a little water into his steam to achieve a much larger effect.
Received via e-mail:
Dear New Energy Times,
You wrote “Unfortunately, the professors didn’t think about how Rossi could be flushing water down the hole in the wall rather than turning it into steam. The professors never thought to ask the obvious disturbing question, ‘Hey, where’s the huge steam output?’”
I wish to state that the earth wire hypothesis is the more important, applying to the first 7 of the 9 publicized tests – when worst case assumptions about steam quality still show a large power gain.
The 29 March test produced visible steam plus water at its single outlet, so it must have been 100C. This was confirmed by the thermocouple which read 100.1C. The water flow rate of 6.5 L/h, and to produce this visible steam requires a power of at least 1022 watts (10% of water vaporized which means by mass). This uses heat capacity from 18C to 100C plus 10% of heat of vaporization.
Kullander’s report says the metered input power was 300W. Therefore, with ANY steam quality assumption there is still a COP of at least 3 – requiring Rossi’s claim to be real. My earth lead hypothesis, in which up to 3000 w could be smuggled in past the meter, can account for the observations in the first 7 tests.
Ian Bryce
Australian Skeptics Society
[Ed: New Energy Times thanks Mr. Bryce for his letter.]
Maybe everyone can agree on this. Any new test of Defkalion or Rossi reactors should include:
- monitoring of the input power (all three wires) through a Clarke-Hesse or equivalent broadband power analyzer
- establishment of a reliable method of measuring output power that does NOT rely on generation of steam. Levi used liquid flow calorimetry on Rossi’s E-cat last February. That would be the best method to use again. Alternatively, if steam for some strange reason MUST be used, then it should be sparged and enthalpy should be measured. In addition a professional steam quality instrument should be used and all output steam and water should be openly shown and measured. Defkalion’s proposed comparative calorimetry involving comparison of the surface and interior temperatures without adequate cooling of a working reactor with a control reactor is specifically not acceptable.
- all flow meters should be calibrated and throughput of water measured two different ways during the experiment
- the entire system of measuring output energy should be calibrated. E-cats and Hyperions have built in electrical heaters. It is a simple matter to run them without fuel. Then you can add electrical heat equivalent to the expected output and you can verify that the output energy measurement method is accurate.
- the test should run long enough to positively exclude, preferably by a factor of 10, the run time which could be expected from any known store of chemical energy, electrical energy, stored preheat, and physico-chemical reactions such a Raney nickel. An expert on Raney nickel should be consulted.
- the actual length of time for the run should follow NASA guidelines published from a NASA slide on this web site. IIRC, 24+ hours for the small E-cat, and several days for the “Ottoman” sized one. The size of the Defkalion device seems to be intermediate and the time it would need to run should be evaluated against the NASA suggestions. There’s no advantage at all to the testers to allow a brief test. A heat exchanger for the output is neither necessary nor permissible because it invites misplacement of the output temperature thermocouple.
- the COP and power levels should fit the claims — at least the lower limit of the claims– of the manufacturer. These are all a matter of public record.
- a specialist in stage magic should carefully inspect all equipment provided by the manufacturer for hidden wires and tubing which could provide extraneous energy during the run. However, the interior working of the device need not be revealed and can be treated by the testers as a “black box” provided the run time recommendations above are followed so as to exclude stored preheat.
I think we can all agree that several reporters and scientists who should have known better may have been fooled by Andrea Rossi. It is important to cover all bases to make sure it doesn’t happen again with Defkalion, especially when Mr. Smith’s million dollars is at risk. No need to argue, like Mr. Bryce is doing, about which test is best. I say do them all. It isn’t that difficult, expensive or time consuming considering the huge stakes involved.