I feel reasonably confident that we will see the long-expected third party E-Cat test report within the next few weeks. There have been a number of clues, leaks and hints that seem to point in that direction, anyway. The question on my mind right now is that assuming the report gets published, and it provides further evidence that the E-Cat reaction is ‘unconventional’ and potentially useful as an energy source — what happens next?
One thing I am confident of is that this will be a very big event in the LENR community. I am certain that many readers here and others who have been following the LENR story are paying close attention and will scrutinize the report to get as much information as possible from it, and draw conclusions therefrom. I think we are very good at analysis and interpretation of data, and I expect that there will be very useful new information in this report that will help us get a bigger picture of what the E-Cat is all about.
What is not so sure is what the wider reaction will be from the wider scientific community and the general public. If LENR is going to ever get a foothold in the public consciousness, something needs to happen that will make people sit up and take notice.
If the reaction to the publication of the first third party report is anything to go by there are some things we can expect. There will be hyper-critical analysis of the report from people skeptical about LENR in general and the E-Cat in particular, and if there is anything in the report that opens the door for doubt about the report’s conclusions, it will be seized up and magnified — and could have the effect of essentially nullifying any positive impact of the report.
In the previous report there were questions raised from skeptical sources about the chance for hidden wires being used to feed the E-Cat hidden DC power — the implication was that since this test took place in Rossi’s own factory he could have rigged the whole demonstration. In my mind, this scenario was preposterous — but that didn’t really matter. The doubt was raised and repeated widely enough that it ended up being taken seriously by opinion-makers and media persons — and the report was largely discounted and therefore ignored.
There was also the fact that in the first report, there was no analysis of the contents of the reactor. It was essentially a black-box test — something which many people discounted as being non-scientific, and therefore not worthy of being taken seriously.
My hope is that the new test will be different enough in terms of experimental setup, location, and materials analysis that the objections brought up previously will not apply. But there may be other things that skeptics can bring up to shed doubt on the whole affair — I don’t doubt that they will try.
Anyway, I have been trying to formulate a plan of action for when the report is published, and this is my current outline.
1. Announce the publication of the report as soon as I hear about it.
2. Read the report.
3. Listen to the analysis of others whose opinion I respect (many ECW readers)
4. If the report has important findings, try to share it with as many people who I think will be interested as possible — especially people in the media and scientific communities. I hope to be able to use any influence I may have to get the information to as wide an audience as possible.
There’s only so much planning one can do with so many unknowns still out there, but if the report is noteworthy, I feel we have a duty to share it widely. I hope our job will be made much easier with the assistance of more influential media outlets, but I don’t think that assistance is guaranteed.
So it’s an interesting time. I don’t know when the report will arrive, but I feel it could be in the next couple of weeks. I think I’m as ready as I can be.
How about you — do you have any plans? Maybe people here could collaborate in some way.
