Sergio Focardi

Sergio Focardi died June 22. He was 81 and had been in declining health for many years. Focardi was a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Bologna. He was a key associate and friend of Francesco Piantelli, who discovered the nickel-hydrogen-gas LENR method. New Energy Times wrote two feature articles about their work in 2008. Piantelli and Focardi were never able to achieve high rates of repeatability for their work, nor did they ever achieve widespread recognition for their significant contribution to the field.

Fairy Godfather of Cold Fusion: Drawing by adw, photo by dubross

June 28, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Two professors at Uppsala University, in Sweden, have published critical comments about their colleagues’ endorsement of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device.

Göran Ericsson and Stephan Pomp, professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala, uploaded their critique on Wednesday to the arXiv preprint server. Their paper reports serious deficiencies in a May 20 paper written by seven researchers, including three professors at Uppsala.

“Wishful thinking seems to have replaced scientific rigor,” Ericsson and Pomp wrote.

The authors of the May 20 paper say they made an independent test of Rossi’s device. They also say, “By the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.”

The authors of that paper are Giuseppe Levi (University of Bologna), Evelyn Foschi (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics), Torbjörn Hartman (senior research engineer at the Svedberg Laboratory, Uppsala University), Bo Höistad (professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University), Roland Pettersson (senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Uppsala University), Lars Tegnér (professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences at Uppsala University) and Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology).

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Motto of the U.K. Royal Society: “Nullius in Verba.” (Take no one’s word for it.)

— June 6, 2013 —

Steven B. Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times
369-B Third Street, #556
San Rafael, CA USA 94901

To Drs. Giuseppe Levi (University of Bologna), Evelyn Foschi (INFN), Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson, Lars Tegnér (Uppsala University), Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology)

Dear Drs. Levi, Foschi, Hartman, Höistad, Pettersson, Tegnér and Essén,

This is an open letter about your preprint submission to arXiv on May 16, “Indication of Anomalous Heat Energy Production in a Reactor Device.”

In your preprint, you claimed that you made an independent test of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device and that, according to your test, his device produced energy that was an order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.

This letter is prompted by my concerns about your preprint, the validity of the device’s thermal output that you claimed to confirm, and the integrity of the inventor whom you have endorsed.

In June 2011, I traveled to Bologna, Italy, to meet Rossi in person and to observe his device. He offered to demonstrate it to me while it was running and allowed me to videotape. In the opinion of skilled engineers who later viewed the videotape, the steam output appeared to be equivalent to a 1,000 Watt electric tea kettle. Rossi, however, claimed it was producing 5,000 Watts of heat. In fact, his results were consistent with the 770 Watts of electrical power that he was putting into the system. (Please see “The Failure of Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer, Caught on Video.”)

Despite the obvious problems with Rossi’s public claims of extraordinary output of excess heat from his E-Cats, I am convinced that LENRs are real nuclear phenomena. Continue reading »