Rossi on His Anxiety Over E-Cat Test Results

Here’s a comment on the Journal of Nuclear Physics by Andrea Rossi that I found interesting — in response to a question by Giuliano Bettini who asked Rossi about the source of his anxiety regarding the upcoming tests. Giuliano asked Rossi whether he was nervous because a) he was afraid that negative test results would undermine all his work, or that b) these new tests might reveal that there had been a fundamental misunderstanding, and all his work was based on an illusion. To both those questions, Rossi responded ‘no, it is not’; then went on to say:

The anxiety is generated by the immense importance of a test made by a third independent party of experts of the field, in a neutral laboratory, for a long time, collecting millions of data examined for months, analyzed in independent laboratories of different Universities, for the first time in the history of LENR. Let me make a simple example: you have to sustain an exam , a difficult one, in a University’s Faculty; you have studied well, you made tests by yourself, you are sure to have understood the matter, but the exam is long and the result of the exam will be important for your future career: shouldn’t you be anxious? That’s my feeling, aggravated from the fact that I have not a clue of when there will be the results and I have not a clue either about the work that the Professors are doing.

Rossi seems to see this report as being a monumental and watershed moment for his work — in fact he characterizes the test as being the most exhaustive one ever carried out in the history of LENR in terms of the amount of time, work and analysis being done by an independent party.

His example about an exam is a good one, I think. Even if you may have done meticulous preparation for an important test, until you get the results back there’s always going to be an element of suspense about the outcome. You might wonder about the mindset of the examiners — how critical they might be, and how competent they might be. I suppose Rossi might be concerned about exactly what testing has been done, possible mistakes being made by the testers, about the quality of instrumentation being used, and other factors that might affect the outcome.

Rossi also probably realizes the importance of this testing from the point of view of Industrial Heat’s business plan, and if there are problems, how that might affect commercialization and industrialization of the E-Cat.

So while Rossi may be confident regarding his discovery, there are plenty of things to be worried about — and I guess that observers like ourselves might be feeling similar (albeit lesser) levels of concern for some of the same reasons.