At 02:12 PM 5/22/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Google Alerts brought me this gem:
<http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/radio/radio_show_1021.html>http://www.guidetothecosmos.com/radio/radio_show_1021.html
Toward the end, it gets worse. Krivit faults Energetics Technologies
for emphasizing the energy-out/energy-in ratio from one experiment
that couldn't be reproduced (at that level). It's a complex issue, in
fact. ET's work has been verified semi-independently by ENEA and SRI.
How much credence to give an outlier is certainly a question. But
then Krivit, who is offended by ET perhaps exaggerating their work --
and I can also understand his irritation with the popular video that
showed deuterons happily fusing -- announces that ET has shut down,
though it wasn't completely clear. He said they lost their funding,
he heard, and that employees had moved to Missouri. Gee, I wonder
what is in Missouri?
So I did a little searching:
http://panjiva.com/Energetics-Technologies-Ltd/4224492
It looks like, from customs records it would seem, ET shipped 16,000
pounds of stuff to Missouri, January 28, 2010.
Energetics Technologies is a New Jersey company, actually. It might
make sense for them to be close to a sympathetic university, as the
U. of Missouri, because of Robert Duncan. Is the company still
operating, or did they sell their equipment and supplies, etc., to
someone in Missouri, and did employees move there as employees of ET,
or to join some new effort. Now where is that investigative reporter
when we need him?
I think he blew it with ET, though, when he made a huge deal out of
Dardik's medical past, and the connection between LifeWave and SuperWave.
Frank, Dardik is an intuitive kind of guy, was a serious medical
researcher and surgeon, and sports physician to the U.S. Olympic
team. He came up with this concept of lifewave, which has to do with
the health effects of disequilibrium. He invented interval training,
as I understand it. Definitely on the edge, in terms of orthodoxy. Is
this related to cold fusion? Well, his general theories about The Way
Stuff Works led him to suspect that these fractal superwaves might
help with cold fusion. Maybe. Does it have to do with biology? Well,
does phystics have anything to do with biology? Which came first, the
chicken or the egg?
Dardik's funding for cold fusion was apparently coming from a wealthy
patient of his, a man very grateful for Dardik's health advice, who
has been supporting much of Dardik's work since the 1990s. According
to Roger Lewin (Making Waves, Rodale, 2005), the idea for Energetics
Technologies came from Sidney Kimmel, a man with a net worth of
around $1 to $3 billion. (Recent report:
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_Sidney-Kimmel_NM4F.html,
shows $1.1 billion.) http://www.kimmel.org/About_Sidney_Kimmel13.html
The guy has his fingers in a lot of pies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16_5.html
mentions Dardik and Kimmel. Along with McKubre and Hagelstein.
Dardik's story is complicated. And very interesting, I found. I
recommend the Lewin book. I'm skeptical about SuperWave, but, hey,
until we know what's going on, I wouldn't rule anything out, and
SuperWave is not actually a theory, at all, of how cold fusion works,
it's a kind of engineering approach, my guess is that it might work
by encouraging transient conditions of flux that allow the NAE to pop
up. But it could also be gremlins, time bandits, or, hey, maybe
hydrinos are involved. Or just some unexpected conditions in the
lattice that nobody had looked at or actually calculated the effects
to be expected. Until Takahashi, of course. But that's my own bug.
Like all the theories, it has some problems.
It's too bad Krivit isn't reporting on the *problems* with
Widom-Larsen theory. It's as if he doesn't realize there are any.
Perhaps that's because he doesn't understand W-L theory any more than
the others. I wouldn't blame him on that, neither do I. That is, when
I look at it, I come up with a host of obvious objections that Larsen
doesn't bother to deal with, little details like reaction rates,
which become critical when you are positing a multistep process.
Since I like to presume that some theory isn't *totally stupid*, my
operating hypothesis is that I don't understand it. And maybe nobody
else does either.... Bad sign, I suppose. On the other hand....
