Black Swan event.

Hmmm, either nobody knows what a Black Swan event is or nobody has heard of Andrea Rossi and his Ecat. Andrea Rossi is on the verge of going into production with what he describes as a LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reactor. A LENR is of course a euphemism for Cold Fusion, which got a black eye about 20 years ago.

Just three days ago a 1 megawatt reactor was tested. It did not produce 1 megawatt but it did produce 470 kilowatts. Not bad for something that is impossible.

That’s where the Black Swan event comes in.

From Wikipedia: “The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight. The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain: 1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology 2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities) 3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs Unlike the earlier philosophical "black swan problem", the "black swan theory" refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.” etc., etc., etc.

The success of Cold Fusion is of course a Black Swan event simply because Governments have decreed that CF is impossible because hot fusion is all the rage and can only be produced with MASSIVE amounts of capital investment. Cold Fusion is quite literally “power for the people”. The U.S. Patent office will not issue a patent on a Cold Fusion device. So the term LENR must be used to describe a Nuclear reaction that transmutes Nickel into Copper using Hydrogen while releaseing a small but significant amount of energy. Here’s where it gets very interesting; Dr Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley has remarked “we are trying to core down on the theory, as well as utilize it for system optimization. We are not trying to do a net energy demo at all, we are simply trying to make sure there is a valid theoretical understanding . . . We do not have enough details, by far, to even start to think of a replication of Rossi.”

Of course passions are running hot. So the question is: Does Andrea Rossi’s ECAT constitute THE Black Swan event of the century? This of course depends on if you think half a megawatt of energy from a self-sustaining reaction constitutes a successful demonstration of a Low Energy Nuclear Reactor.

For a pretty good read one should Google Forbes + ECAT. Forbes is evidentlly the only media outlet in the west that is daring to report on Rossi and his ECAT.