$20 million invested from Wall street into LENR

Yes, this makes perfect sense. The P.T. Barnum business model is alive and well, always has been and always will be.

Reminds me of a private equity scam an investor friend asked me to look into a few years back, based on a patent the "inventors" got while at Princeton university, which they claimed had successfully predicted an epileptic seizure in a dog, and which they claimed they were going to develop into a seizure predictor for humans with the 2 million in private equity they were raising. The patent turned out to be for a random 'event' generator with programmable statistics. When I pointed out to the lawyer attempting to raise the cash that there was no known means by which this could work, he tried to give me this "everything was new once" spiel, and I responded that if you were going to propose something which violates the known laws of physics you need to have really exceptional evidence, not a one off bad measurement like cold fusion, which is what his dog seizure prediction appeared to be. After a brief pause he said that he understood what I meant, he had raised capital for cold fusion too, thanked me for my time and hung up.

You can be sure he made money on the cold fusion scam, and he or someone like him will make money on LENR, and making money is what it is all about.

and well, always has been and always will be.

I meant the physics. I've already heard all those that think it's a scam. Mikek

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What physics are you talking about - there is certainly *no* physics involved with LENR or with raising $20 million capital for it. If they ever published any actual physical analysis, it would be obvious to everyone that it is a scam, so you can be certain that they will never do that. The "physics" will remain secret until they have bilked every possible dollar from the scam, as with all of the scams that preceded it and all of those that will follow.

"Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Marvin Gardner (free download available, should be required reading for all high school students) will give you the best explanation of LENR available.

Of course it's a scam. If it made enough neutrons to make any serious amount of power, it would kill everyone nearby.

Download page: (1.1 MBytes, 204 pages, 2nd edition, 1956)

Rossis-E-

Perhaps he meant the physics of the scam, which has already been covered here: they are using blatantly bogus methods of measuring both input power (watts = volts x amps for an undisclosed AC waveform) and output power (standard handbook equations for heat loss from a tank based on surface temperature are only good to about 20% and therefore these equations are fudged to calculate the high end of the typical error range, since their intended use is sizing heaters and it is better to err on the high side than the low side - not to mention the selection of about the least accurate method available for measuring surface temperature). In this regard they are one up on Pons and Fleishman, who only used (the same) bogus methods to measure input power.

If the "NR" involved is fission, then it is very well established that electrical current through a radioactive material will not affect decay rate; only a neutron flux can do that. If it is fusion, then how do you think it might be possible to get the nuclei close enough to fuse without even providing enough energy to remove the electrons? There is absolutely nothing about this that makes a lick of sense!

If it looks like a scam, walks like a scam, and quacks like a scam ...

None whatsoever apart from the obvious trick of cold fusion scams separating the terminally gullible from their wallet contents.

Send me $10 and I will tell you how to get rich kwik!

The physics of the scam relies as always on bad calorimetry.

You could do it with protons in a Van der Graff machine into a lithium target - atom smasher style but it isn't very energetically favourable.

The only one that does sort of work is muon catalysed fusion - the real physics that spooked Fleischmann & Pons into premature publication.

I think it was noted that even the power claimed generated by F&P would liberate lethal doses of neutrons.