Quick Note from South India
[DRAFT REPORT]
Hi folks – just a quick informal note from Mamallapuram, India.
ICCF-16 ended without fanfare though Mahadeva Srinivasan pulled off a very pleasant and well-run conference. ICCF-16 presenters spent most of Friday morning’s program talking either directly or indirectly about the Rossi device – even though Rossi didn’t attend the ICCF-16 conference.
Someone stood in front of the group a few days ago and announced a rumor that Rossi had made some business deal in Greece for a ton of money. There were no cheers from the ICCF-16 audience. The presenters who spoke here either directly or indirectly about the Rossi device – all who have no business relationship with Rossi – appeared to suggest to the group that a) they were qualified to evaluate the device b) the device might be dangerous c) they had certain insights into Rossi’s integrity.
So now it seems that the most promising theory (see last paragraph) did not originate from the ICCF community, as well, the most promising device thus far was also “not invented here.”
The next ICCF would normally follow the intercontinental rotation and go to North America for ICCF-17. But surprisingly, no American came to the conference prepared with a proposal and commitment to lead ICCF-17. People who lead these conferences enjoy great latitude for choosing the program, selecting topics, themes and, on occasion, promoting specific ideologies within the low-energy nuclear reactions research field.
This is particularly surprising because David Nagel and Michael Melich ran ICCF-14, and according to someone who was at the private meeting of International Advisory Committee, the ad-hoc group which decides on each successive conference, neither of them put forward a bid. Michael McKubre suggested that he might volunteer to run ICCF-17 but he came with no proposal. The IAC was not eager to authorize McKubre to coordinate ICCF-17 without a formal proposal and gave him until March to come up with one.
On the other hand, Sunwon Park, a chemical engineering professor with the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology expressed a strong desire to host one of the next ICCF conferences and according to the person who attended the meeting, Park mentioned that he had financial support from the Korean government to help subside a future ICCF conference. There were about five Koreans who attended ICCF-16.
About 30 of us are in Mamallapuram attending a post-conference workshop on materials science issues related to LENR. A second post-conference workshop takes place Tuesday on LENR biological transmutations.
In other LENR news today, Lewis Larsen, the originator of the Widom-Larsen LENR theory announced today that on Feb. 22, he will be issued U.S. patent #7,893,414 for a novel, high performance gamma shielding device. The patent is titled, “Apparatus and Method for Absorption of Incident Gamma Radiation and its Conversion to Outgoing Radiation at Less Penetrating, Lower Energies and Frequencies.”
