Well, there goes 2011, a year that was, to say the least, a mixed bag.In the tech world it has been an interesting year. The Large Hadron Collider has, so far, failed to find evidence of the Higgs Boson (boo!) but at least it didn’t, as some people had feared, create a black hole that swallowed the earth (hooray!). Biological research produced promising results regarding antiviral drugs that may cure the common cold (hooray!) but a cure for cancer and HIV stills seems a long way away (boo!).
Curiously over 2011 Silicon Valley has shown a powerful resurgence of energy and dynamism (hooray!) and with that some of the wild optimism that characterized the 90′s tech bubble has reappeared (hummm). Apple became a commercial monster (hummm) despite the passing of Steve Jobs (boo!) and the IT world also had a generally positive year (hooray!).
I could go on and on with boos and hoorays for pages but there’s one topic I want to focus on: Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer or “E-Cat” system that is, despite everything we know so far, still in limbo somewhere between Boo! and Hooray!
If this topic is new to you, the really short summary is that the E-Cat is a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) or “cold fusion” device that generates large amounts of heat for a miniscule cost.
I first wrote about the E-Cat and its implications in my Backspin column in Network World back in October and then again a couple of weeks laterhere in my Forbes Technobable blog. Since then I have covered various aspects of the topic in a number of follow-up columns; should you wish to peruse any of these, here’s the list:
- Cheap power: An overnight revolution
- Hello Cheap Energy, Hello Brave New World
- Believing in Cold Fusion and the E-Cat
- Waiting for Cold Fusion
- National Instruments and Cold Fusion?
- How to Make Cold Fusion Work: Use Unobtainium
- Podcast: “E-Cat: Is it Cold Fusion or Hot Air?”
Why so many postings on this topic? Simple … as I pointed out at some length in the first columns, should Rossi’s E-Cat work as claimed, it will transform the world making oil, coal, and conventional nuclear power along with wind and solar power obsolete as energy sources.
Alas, despite a large amount of mainstream press coverage (most of it pretty uninformed and uninformative) and an incredible amount of blog coverage, the question of whether the E-Cat really works remains unproven because over the last year the E-Cat’s inventor, Andrea Rossi, has given a number of impressive but inconclusive demonstrations. These were inconclusive because they weren’t run in such a way as to remove doubt about what’s really going on and whether more energy was being generated by the E-Cat than was being put into it.
I should qualify that: When I write “inconclusive” I mean inconclusive to people who demand a realistic, scientific level of evidence … there’s a huge army of “believers” who contend (often in a fanatical and downright rude way) that Rossi’s system really does work. The central problem that makes the E-Cat so hard for people such as myself to believe in is that it would have to operate contrary to known physics.
The best explanation of why the E-Cat can’t work can be found in a terrific blog posting titled “The Physics of why the e-Cat’s Cold Fusion Claims Collapse ” by Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist. Siegel’s analysis concludes:
… it’s time for the e-Cat’s proponents to provide the provable, testable, reproducible science that can answer these straightforward physics objections. Independent verification is the cornerstone of all scientific investigation and experiment, it’s how we weed out all sorts of errors from miscalibration to contamination, and how we protect ourselves from unscrupulous swindles. Given everything that we know … it’s time to set aside the mirage ofNickel + Hydrogen fusion and get back to work finding real solutions to our energy and environmental problems.
Siegel is only one of many scientists who dispute the claim that the E-Cat can work yet despite such commentary it has been reported that Rossi has secured many orders for E-Cat systems to be delivered in 2012. On top of that a number of other companies have appeared offering similar products which, like Rossi’s E-Cat, have yet to be proven to work.
So, here we are, at the close of 2011 still waiting for Rossi or anyone to prove that the E-Cat or some other LENR/cold fusion device really works.
If the whole thing is a fraud it’s going to be one of the greatest in modern times. If it’s not, 2012 is going to be the year when everything changes.
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