With permission I am posting a report written by Brian Josephson, retired professor of physics at Cambridge University, and 1973 Nobel prize winner for physics. Dr. Josephson recently met with Andrea Rossi in Miami.
By chance I was in Miami recently and took the opportunity to arrange a meeting with Andrea Rossi. Although I had some questions prepared, our meeting was of the nature of an informal chat over lunch rather than a formal interview.
Rossi talked first of all of his ability to run the e-cat stably at high temperatures, quoting a specific temperature of 600 deg. C rather than simply saying ‘high temperature’ as in recent reports. The present effort is concentrated on making the machinery that will build the e-cats, and the second buyer does not yet at this time have any e-cats to comment on. The promised detailed account of the workings of the e-cat will be given when production is sufficiently advanced and
patents have been granted, which he anticipates will happen in the next few months (on the question of how genuine all this is, see the end of this report).
Through our discussions I have come to understand what may underlie some of his apparently perverse behaviour:
1. In the course of a scientific training one comes to appreciate the difficulties involved in obtaining a reliable result. Rossi’s perspective on experiments seems to be of a more limited kind (perhaps based on the kind of experiments one does in school, where one just carries out some prescribed process and out come the answers), which perhaps explains his impatience with people who criticise his demonstrations and want better ones (his opinion is that whatever experiment one does, people will not be satisfied, so he takes the alternative view that ‘the market will decide’).
2. The thought of people wanting to steal his secrets seems to weigh heavily on his mind, leading him to be suspicious of proposals by people such as Celani, whom he, in my view inappropriately, characterised as a ‘rival’.
3. While this did not come up in our discussion, one has to speculate that his paranoid tendency can only have been enhanced by his experience, shared by a number of us, with a particular science reporter whom I will not name here.
Perhaps this is being naive, but I find it difficult to imagine a conversation with a scammer having proceeded in the way that it did during our meeting, and feel that factors such as those listed above are much the more likely explanation for his behaviour. There is no reason why an inventor should adhere to the standards demanded of scientists and academics.
Brian Josephson
11th. May 2012
