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Science

NASA to Investigate Hydrinos 197

Posted by michael from the mills-lyman-balmer-and-paschen dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes "A new NASA program might once and for all settle the "hydrino" question. The concept of the hydrino -- hydrogen shrunk below its normal state with the resulting release of extreme ultraviolet light -- has been derided by the physics establishment and surprisingly embraced by many engineers and people with deep pockets. Slashdot hashed the hydrino pretty vigorously in December 1999. Now NASA is funding independent research into making a rocket from this novel idea. If it works, we could be seeing a sea change in physics. If it fails, hydrinos might finally just float away. There's an active study group of several hundred users (including some prominent scientists) devoted to debating the possible existence of hydrinos. In many ways it sprang from slashdot."
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NASA to Investigate Hydrinos More

NASA to Investigate Hydrinos

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  • That sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)

    by cscx ( 541332 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @08:56PM (#3663257) Homepage
    The concept of the hydrino -- hydrogen shrunk below its normal state

    Sounds like a hydrogen atom took a dip in a cold swimming pool...

    Oh wait...
  • ...among NASA engineers? I get the feeling there is tension between scientists and engineers there.
    • Is there a kind of anti-science culture among NASA engineers?
      Yes! Check out Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, by Robert Park for an excellent discussion of this kind of thing. They have a small but nonnegligible number of people contributing to antigravity, perpetual motion, and other pseudo-science. It's pretty sad.
      • They have a small but nonnegligible number of people contributing to antigravity, perpetual motion, and other pseudo-science.

        Ah, but it's sometimes the pursuit of foolishness that finds the real gem hidden in the grass. They may never actually make any of the psuedo-sciences work, but they may discover something useful (and totally unrelated) in their meandering path. It's fine by me as long as they keep the number of people and dollars small.

      • I'm afraid that I've read & encountered a lot of bizarre cranks because I find them interesting, and a lot more of them are engineers than scientists. Doctors are also a more credulous group than you would expect.

        I think it may be because these are very bright educated people, but who may not have some fairly important intellectual tools, and don't know what they're missing. Consequently you have doctors & engineers who fall for chain letters, or cold fusion, or data compression in excess of a hundred percent.

        It's also easy to find engineers & doctors arguing for perpetual motion, squaring the circle, or trisecting an angle with a compass & straightedge.

        Venture capitalists, on the other hand, don't have to be as bright or educated as engineers or doctors, and we probably shouldn't talk about software "engineers" here, either. (Hey, I don't have any degree at all.)

      • Yes! Check out Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, by Robert Park for an excellent discussion of this kind of thing. They have a small but nonnegligible number of people contributing to antigravity, perpetual motion, and other pseudo-science. It's pretty sad.

        Interestingly enough, the aerospace industry seems to attract a disproportionate number of these types. For example, the Huntsville, Alabama area is home to a significant group of "free energy" researchers.

        However, anyone who thinks that NASA's grant will settle the hydrino question once and for all simply doesn't understand the mind of a pseudoscientist. You can never present enough negative evidence to convince these types. When the hydrino rocket fails to work, they'll just claim "Oh, that guy didn't do x, y, or z, otherwise it would have worked."

        Hydrinos will make headlines as long as Blacklight Power can keep convincing investors to throw away their money. In another two or three years the deep pockets will run out of patience and hydrinos will fade into crank science obscurity.
      • IHNJH, IJLS "I took undergrad Physics from Bob Park."

        --Blair
        "I did."
    • There has always been tension between engineers and scientists. Scientists theorize and test said theories. Engineers implement stuff. The two don't always mix.
  • It seems to me that NASA thinks anything could be used as propulsion for craft, not that they are at all wrong. Physics is a great thing, and it opens up new doors all the time. Things like this, ion propulsion, and solar sails are bitchen ideas. What I'd like to see, though, is a manned Mars mission launched from a couple of 2L soda bottles in my back yard. Let's see them do that!

  • Schrodinger (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fantanicity ( 583135 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:05PM (#3663279) Journal
    My first thought was the Schrodinger equation [shodor.org] - it can be solved for Hydrogen.

    Question 1 : Are hydrinos possible according to the Schrodinger equation?

    Question 2 : If not, what changes to Schrodinger are needed to explain hydrinos and are these changes consistent with the rest of physics?

    (Question 0 : Or am I smoking crack again?)

    The only hits on Schrodinger and Hydrino were from the blacklight people and they seemed to skirt around the question.

    • Re:Schrodinger (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dannon ( 142147 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:19PM (#3663319) Journal
      Question 1 : Are hydrinos possible according to the Schrodinger equation?

      Yes and no.

    • No and ??? (Score:3, Informative)

      by apsmith ( 17989 )
      This is the first I've heard of hydrino's, but the quantum states of hydrogen were solved a long time ago, and there's no room in there for any kind of "shrunk" atom if it is to consist of a proton and an electron.

    • Yes, if you add another force (Score:4, Informative)

      by BlowCat ( 216402 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @10:43PM (#3663539)
      If you only take the electro-magnetic force into account, then it's impossible. If you introduce some other force, it's possible. Some atoms, such as Kr-81 can actually partly "collapse" - it's called "electron capture" and is caused by the Weak Force. This is not possible for hydrogen, because the resulting neutron would be heavier that the original atom. We don't know any such force that would result in a lower energetic state for hydrogen.
      • well, if you look at the "burst" of ultraviolet light, that would put the electron somewhere within the maximum probability of the nucleus of the atom (from the energy that it would have to lose to produce ultraviolet light and the average energy level drop of the electron)... probably not such a good idea. We should either talk to the engineers and people funding this adventure, or consult God and tell him to redesign the universe.
    • The question you should be asking, whenever you are evaluating a scientific idea is :

      Is/are X consistent with our experimental knowledge of nature?

      Where "X" is any hypothesis you wish to check. It can be the "hydrino hypothesis", or it can be the Schrodinger equation.

      Now, it is a very simple and straightforwards matter to set up an experimental apparatus [purdue.edu] to observe the emission lines from hydrogen. Many of us have done it in college or even high schools labs. Each transition is seen in the spectrum.

      The result? Completely consistent with the Schrodinger equation (or even the previous simpler Bohr model). If there were an energy state lower than the n = 1 quantum state, it would produce a very visible emission line, which is not seen. This is a very glaring inconstency which is not apparently addressed by this speculative work. Where is all of that supposed "UV" radiation going? Why don't we see it? I believe one can only conclude the fellow is a crank . And before someone trots his degrees out for us again, I must note that academic pedigree does not render one immune to academic senility).

      While I think we do need some portion of research devoted to cutting-edge ideas, I think a minimum requirement for any serious effort is some nominal level of consistency with well-established work. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it seems apparent that hydrinos do not supply such evidence. In my own opinion, NASA would be far better off devoting their research efforts towards cutting-edge propulsion technologies with a much greater likelihood of success (ie, ion drives, MHD drives, solar sails...)

      Bob

  • Anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence will stand clear of concepts that sprung from someone's "Grand Unified Theory". Einstien looked for it his whole career with no success.
    • Wow, what a load of BS. So Einstein's search for a GUT was totally separate from his work in quantum mechanics and, let us not forget, relativity?

      So this guy's GUT is probably crap, but maybe he'll get something useful out of it on the way. (Or maybe he's a total nuthead, I dunno, but this isn't grounds for dismissal.)

  • Ion Emissions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sorthum ( 123064 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:08PM (#3663289) Homepage
    Hmm, last I heard NASA was still focusing on ion emissions as the "future of propulsion."

    If that hasn't been dismissed yet, I might suspect that they're spreading themselves a mite thin...

    • Re:Ion Emissions (Score:2, Informative)

      by yasth ( 203461 )
      ??? Ion engines work fine thank you very much
      Boeing even sold one of them [boeing.com] for comerical use, so it might even be considered out of R&D and into present tech stage.
    • Yep, that $75,000 they gave this guy is really going to hurt their operations in other areas. That kind of money will buy about a tenth of a second of a shuttle launch. Spreading themselves thin, they certainly are.
    • Ion propulsion is serious, working, propulsion technique, but NASA is constantly giving small amounts of funding to various strange ideas and theories, gambling that one of them might actually work, and eventually evolve to some kind of "warp engine", anti-gravity or whatever.

  • Sure. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:16PM (#3663313) Homepage
    "...In many ways it sprang from slashdot." Because copying a story makes you responsible for the discovery of a theory that breaks modern physics.

  • Don't get excited... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:21PM (#3663323) Journal
    Just because NASA gives money to somebody to research something doesn't mean it's not a crackpot idea. They set up a project to try to verify Podkletnov's horse manure [slashdot.org], too, didn't they?
    • Just because NASA gives money to somebody to research something doesn't mean it's not a crackpot idea. They set up a project to try to verify Podkletnov's horse manure [slashdot.org], too, didn't they?

      At least Podkletnov's horse manure is experimentally testable. That's more than can be said for the horse manure produced by physicists who have retreated into areas where they are safe from any experimental verifiability--like cosmologists or string theorists.

  • Muon-catalyzed fusion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:26PM (#3663336) Homepage Journal
    Sounds reminiscent of muon-catalyzed fusion. The muon has the same charge as an electron, but is many times more massive. Substitute a muon for an electron, and the "orbit" around the nucleus is much smaller. Enough smaller that it's not tough to get "muonized" hydrogen to fuse.

    Unfortunately, muons decay rather quickly, and it take more energy to make them than you get from the fusion.

    But the hydrino idea still reminds me of it.
    • The biggest difference between muon catalyzed fusion and hydrinos is that there is a strong, logically consistent, and testable basis on which muon catalyzed fusion rests. Not just a bunch of buzzwords and VC funding.
    • Unfortunately, muons decay rather quickly, and it take more energy to make them than you get from the fusion

      IIRC a bigger problem with MCF was the muons' tendency to stick to the fast (higher-charged) helium resulting from fusion, thus geting the muons out of the De-Tr mixture and reducing efficiency.

      but as someone else said, MCF was a very plausible scientific/engineering idea at the time. This hydrino thing is something out of a crack-pipe.

  • There's an active study group of several hundred users (including some prominent scientists) devoted to debating the possible existence of hydrinos. In many ways it sprang from slashdot.

    While I lack the knowledge to state wheather or not that's a true statement, I'm glad that Slashdot is making waves in the scientific community - even if they are small waves.

  • Oh God, not these Blacklight loons again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:30PM (#3663353)

    Strange how we've never spotted the emission line corresponding to transitions to this below-ground-state in the hydrogen spectrum, isn't it?

    Strange how a bunch of perpetual motion merchants wave Quantum Mechanics around the place for the explanation of how their gadget works. Sometimes. When no actual physicists are looking, but often when potential investors are around.

    Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it. Nut carries on with career saying 'Yep, NASA were interested, and then they covered it up! Big oil interests leaning on the gub'mint, see, don't care for the little guy, with one of these you could be rich!'

    I suppose NASA have to be doing something Trekkish - the man in the street expects them to be working towards the Starship Enterprise, after all. Just a shame about the fallout.

    Personally, I'm backing Schrodinger to win this one :-)

    • Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it. Nut carries on with career saying 'Yep, NASA were interested, and then they covered it up! Big oil interests leaning on the gub'mint, see, don't care for the little guy, with one of these you could be rich!'

      Strange how many cranks Linus gives respectability to. The non-funded Linux sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their patches and nothing comes of it. Nut carries on with career saying 'Yep, Linus was interested and then he didn't integrate my patch! Alan Cox is leaning on Linux, see, don't care for the litty guy!

      Um, my point in the above is that NASA (and Linus) aren't wrong to be inclusive. Sometimes these 'crackpots' are really on to something. Often they are not, but when they are its usually more than worth having dealt with all the ones who weren't.

      • You took the words right out of my, um, keyboard. Look, even on NASA's budget, $75k is peanuts. It's well worth it from their point of view to fund one of these things every so often on the off-off-off-chance there's something to it. Now, I would be willing to bet that if this isn't just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, the true explanation is something other than what Mills is putting out, but that doesn't mean it's not potentially useful.
    • "...the man in the street expects them to be working towards the Starship Enterprise, after all."

      What do you mean? Nasa already built the starship Enterprise! [nasa.gov]

      *G*

    • Re:Oh God, not these Blacklight loons again... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BlowCat ( 216402 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @10:54PM (#3663557)
      Schrodinger's equation doesn't rule out electron capture in some isotopes. The solution of the equation depends on the forces you take into account. Did you notice the emission line corresponding to the transitions from Kr-81 to Br-81? [maricopa.edu] No? Just because you don't see it, it doesn't mean it's impossible - it can be a very rare event.

      Even if the hydrino theory is bogus, let's use valid arguments.

    • He claims on his website that the spectral lines have been observed and attributed to other causes--he names high-energy ions. He also says that this claim is particularly vacuous because the spectral lines occur as part of the background radiation of the universe, IOW, the reactions occur in deep space. The lines also occur in our sun, IIRC.

      He says repeatedly on his site that his theories cannot be used to make a perpetual motion machine because his theory does not violate the law of Conservation of Mass and Energy.

      He claims his theory can easily explain the expansion of the universe, and dark matter, among other things. His theory has difficulty explaining certain things that Schrodinger's handles pretty easily, though.

      At $0.0005 per taxpayer, I think it's worth investigating.

    • Re:Oh God, not these Blacklight loons again... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nusuth ( 520833 ) <oooo_0000us&yahoo,com> on Saturday June 08, 2002 @05:30AM (#3664320) Homepage
      Strange how many cranks the NASA Breakthrough Physics Program gives respectability to. NASA's least-funded irrelevant sideshow picks up every nut that comes along, investigates their claim, and nothing comes of it.

      The common property of all those nuts coming along is:

      a) They are usually credible guys and real scientists. Their specific theories may not have the same credibility, but most often than not they would agree with other scientists and vice versa.

      b) Their ideas are not entirely incompatible with modern physics. Usually they are investigating non-orthodox interpretations of the current theories. In non-limiting cases, their theories and current theories lead to same observations.

      c) They make experimentally testable claims. Most experiments are also low budget.

      d) If their claims are found to be true, resulting utility is enormous.

      This is what I would call a good gamble. But it is not my money, so it is not my call.

    • Strange how we've never spotted the emission line corresponding to transitions to this below-ground-state in the hydrogen spectrum, isn't it?

      Maybe it's squant [negativland.com].

  • this won't work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:39PM (#3663376)
    A simple way to look at the hydrogen atom from quantum theory point of view is this:

    Quantum mechanics says, that in order to confine anything (here electron), you need to give momentum which increases as you shrink confinement radius. Who supplies the necessary momentum to confine electron in an atom? It is electrical attraction force between proton and electron. However, the enery needed for momentum increases as square of 1/r, while the amount of enery you can generate from electrical attraction only increases as 1/r. There is a balance at some value of r, and that is the radius of hydrogen atom.

    Now, if you want to shrink hydrogen radius further, you would need to SUPPLY more enery to it, rather than being able to get from it. What complex quantum mechanics equation says is that there is no stable radius below ground level. But even if there is a stable radius below ground level, you still cannot get enery by compressing hydrogen atom. It is like a spring. If it is stretched, then you can retrieve energy by slowly retracting it. But that doesn't mean you can get energy out by compressing an unstretched string.
    • True. Now, I think this guy is a crackpot, but his aim, he says, is not to "compress" the atom, but that, rather, he claims it is already "stretched" at the ground state, and if he can entice the electron to drop to one of these states below the ground state, it will release extra energy.

  • Crackpot is still a crackpot... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AtomicBomb ( 173897 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @09:57PM (#3663420) Homepage
    After so many years, Mills still cannot show the hydrino/blacklight whatever/ is not a crackpot idea.

    Even according to their own website, I cannot see a single reference of the work being accepted by any reputable scientific journal. [blacklightpower.com] (Well, submitted to an IEEE journal is nothing. Rejection process typically takes about 6 months. With so many tech reports, they can keep on submitting and pretending they are doing something.)

  • Osheroff is right. It's crackpottery.
  • This is neat, I never knew what a hydrino was before today.

    The concept of a hydrino, sounds an awful lot like the concept behind minituration in the book/film Fantastic Voyage. Do I got it right?

  • From the FAQ:

    Why aren't we awash in hydrinos and why haven't they been seen before?

    Hydrinos have a number of properties that make them difficult to detect:
    Free hydrinos diffuse out of containers very easily, as the largest of the species (n=1/2) is about the size of helium. Further, hydrinos are auto-catalytic: with the appropriate concentration maintained they will collapse to n=1/100 or so, at which size they will diffuse rapidly out of practically any container. Hydrinos can slip right in between the atoms of solids, including the atoms f container walls.

    Being extremely light, they rapidly float up into the atmosphere and diffuse into space.

    The conditions for hydrino production, that is, collision between free H and a system with a resonant "energy hole" (e.g., K+ and K2+) at low concentrations, are not common on Earth. Free H is extremely reactive and therefore difficult to keep free.

    No one has been looking for them.
  • At first glance, I thought it said "NASA to Investigate Hubris."

  • Quantum Mechanics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by russianspy ( 523929 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @10:34PM (#3663516)
    I see a small problem here. What is described as hydrino violates some of the basic principles of quantum mechanics. There is nothing especially wrong with that except:
    A) For nearly a century pople have been looking at and working with the QM.
    B) Can you guess how many experiments disagree with QM? Anyone? That's right. ZERO. In almost a century we have been unable to find a single experiment that does not follow QM. Einstein spend a lot of energy (pun intended) trying to disprove QM. In that regard QM is the most successful theory in history of human race (so far). Even General Relativity is an approximation (Order beta^2 if I remember properly, where beta = v/c).
    • A) Just a century? Most of physics which is a good approximation took longer than that to refine.

      B) People haven't gotten quantum to deal properly with gravity. There's the pesky problem that quantum fluxuations ought to have an increasing net gravitational pull at smaller scales, which should shred the universe. Obviously, this isn't happening. Obviously, gravity does exist at a larger scale. So quantum isn't complete.

      Does this mean that hydrinos are possible? Yes, everything possible. But 6.626e-34 isn't good odds. Of course, if you try everything with any plausibility a little bit, sooner or later one will pay off.

      • In reply.

        A) Please note that I was refering to Quantum Mechinics in particular. That theory is about century old.

        B) Just like special relativity was not meant to work with gravity, so QM is not really ment to work with it. Within its bounds it is absolute (as far as I know). It may not be the absolute/true view of the universe. However, in its own realm it holds true very nicely. For you information, it also breaks down when you approach the speed of light - that's when relativistic effects become too large to ignore.
        • A) Right, and a century isn't long enough to make it particularly old. It's taken most theories longer to be discovered to be flawed, so the fact that it hasn't been found to be flawed yet doesn't mean all that much.

          B) Within it's realm, it holds true nicely. But our universe isn't that realm, because our universe has gravity (and fast-moving particles). So the mere fact that QM prohibits something doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that it would require that something be going on that quantum doesn't cover.

          Finding something where the quantum effects and gravitational effects interact in a non-trivial way is highly unlikely. But it wasn't all that long ago when we didn't know of any situations where Newton wasn't exact to the accuracy of our equipment.

    • Ummm wave particle duality? Seriously. You can mathematically derive that everything has to be particle based at the quantum level. Its been done and done often. However this is not the case experimentally. So the particle nature of the electron is "relaxed" (i.e. fudged) using wave particle duality so that the experiments work right.

      I remember back in 99 someone said this couldn't work because this violates schrodingers equation which holds true for all electron behavior in hydrogen except for and he gave a short list of a couple things. Sorry friend but exceptions disprove the rule.

      Note also that for hunreds of years all the respectable scientists believed in the four aristotlean elements, impetus theory, and phlogiston theory, too.

      • Re:Quantum Mechanics (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Ummm... what?? Quantum mechanics is a theory of WAVES - so-called particle-wave duality is built into it at the level of the Heisenberg uncertainty priciple, the Schrodinger equation, etc. Which, by the way, this hydrino would obviously violate. And let me just mention - QM was invented nearly a century ago to explain hydrogen, among other things. We have more data on hydrogen (the most abundant element in the universe) than on anything else - it's used as a standard meter stick in physics, astrophysics, chemistry, etc etc... and nowhere in 100 years of theory and experiment, in multiple fields, is there ANY room for this hydrino... and make no mistake, it CERTAINLY would have been noticed long, long ago, if it existed.

      • Re:Quantum Mechanics (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You can mathematically derive that everything has to be particle based at the quantum level.


        No, you can't. Everything is fundamentally a quantum field. Whether "particles" are a good approximation to that field depends on a lot of things; whether you have confinement, whether you have asymptotic "in" and "out" states --- plus things like particle/soliton duality (e.g. sine-Gordon/massive Thirring duality) really muddy the waters. Then there are quantum fields in curved spacetime, where the "particle" content of the universe depends on the observer... and let's not forget string theory! You certainly can't "prove" that everything is a particle when strings and branes are still a possibility.


        So the particle nature of the electron is "relaxed" (i.e. fudged) using wave particle duality so that the experiments work right.


        This is nonsense. As Feynman said (in chapter 1 of his lectures on quantum mechanics, IIRC), a quantum object is neither a wave nor a particle; it is something fundamentally different, but with aspects of both.

      • In reply:

        Ummm wave particle duality? Seriously. You can mathematically derive that everything has to be particle based at the quantum level. Its been done and done often. However this is not the case experimentally. So the particle nature of the electron is "relaxed" (i.e. fudged) using wave particle duality so that the experiments work right.

        You can do a lot of things mathematically that are not necessairly true. That particular statement (everything has to be particle at the quantum level) simply does not agree with some basic physics experiments. Here is a simple one.

        If you're in a room with fluorescent lighting (does not work with normal lightbulbs). Hold two of your fingers so that they're just, almost touching. Look at that light through those fingers. If you do it right you will see diffraction of the light (little colored rings). That's quantum mechanics at work. That's also something that CANNOT be done by a particle. You can also search the web for descriptions of single and double slit experiments. If you've heard of tunneling (which is used in electronics) that is again, only possible if the particle has wave-like properties.

        As for your other comment. Well. I can't really disprove it without knowing what it is. Given your choice of sources...

        Note also that for hunreds of years all the respectable scientists believed in the four aristotlean elements, impetus theory, and phlogiston theory, too.

        Please note that the Greeks did not really belive in the scientific method. All of their "discoveries" where made by purely thinking about the problem. No experiments were preformed (in fact thay had no way of preforming those kinds of experiments). Still, I think they came up with things that are amazingly close to what we belive in right now. None of the "revolutions" in physics really changed things all that much. Just because we have Einstein's Relativity, that does not mean that Sir. Newton was wrong. Sir Isaac's formulas are still good enough to get us to the moon. That's not bad in my book.

        Going back to the greeks for a while. The world would be a better place if people would stop and THINK on what they're going to say, BEFORE they say it.

  • Quick, somebody patent them !

  • perhaps if we find some hydrinos, we could combine them with some dryinos and get pure energy?
  • The BlackLight Rocket link on Wired isn't slashdotted, it's just wrong. Here's the real page [rowan.edu] and a much more informative writeup of the whole concept at space.com, April 2000 [space.com], where Wired seems to have gotten most of their story. Sigh.
  • I am curious to know how much energy this system would produce *if* it worked compared to other sources of energy such as fossil fuels, fission, fusion.

    Thanks
  • I've read everything that's come out of BLP for the last four years. I suggest this paper [blacklightpower.com] for starters, as it's the most compact statement Mills has made on CQM to date. Mills ideas are elegant and simple. Oh, and CQM reasonably explains electron spin in a completely clear way, something standard quantum mechanics hasn't managed. You'll find further papers here. [blacklightpower.com]

    In any case, it might not matter if anyone 'believes' in hydrinos. BLP has developed materials with novel properties through the BLP process, and they'll get these materials to market long before mainstream physics even begins to take CQM seriously.

    Go see what they've done, and if you can, come up with a better explanation for the results of BLP's experiments -- all of them. If you come up with a reasonable alternate explanation (besides "it's a hoax" or "they're just really bad scientists") then by all means come join the Hydrino Study Group.
      • I've read everything that's come out of BLP for the last four years.

      Great! And you've independently replicated all of their experiments, right? Right?

      • come up with a better explanation for the results of BLP's experiments - all of them

      I can think of a pretty good reason for the reported results of their experiments. Mortgages, dental plans, kids to put through college... Remind me, their experiments have been independently verified, right?


      • Great! And you've independently replicated all of their experiments, right? Right?
        The man suggested you read the article. Had you listened to him, you'd have seen this sentence!
        ".. and they've been pretty good about letting others outside verify their excess energy -- there are some things going on that people are having trouble understanding."

        So there you go!

    • What?! Investigate first, then comment? What're you, some kind of nut? This is Slashdot, dammit! Everyone here is an expert on everything; any effort to find out more information would be a waste of time better spent posting comments to show everybody else how smart we are.

      Seriously, I suspect hydrinos may be a dead end, too. But at least I'm smart enough to know that I'm not qualified to dismiss it out-of-hand.

  • | sed 's/nucleuses/nuclei/g'
  • This sure sounds like Cold Fusion/Red Mercury to me.
  • It would be so cool if this worked because then NASA could run an ad asking people to support their funding and show them taking people on tour of a space shuttle...only to find a little black rocket where the engine should be.

    Of course the Genuity people probably would have something to say about that...
  • Physics in general needs to figure out what the wavefunction does actually mean. The issue of the electrons in liquid helium being "split" but cern/slac et all have never donw this is interesting.


    This guy maybe totally wrong but at least he is actually saying no I will try something else.. What if plank or einstein had never assume quantisation (ignoring boltzman and some statistical mecahnics) they assumed something everybody thought at the time was nuts. Now every physics student learns QM.



    Maybe in 2102 we will look back and say wow those QM papers were silly

  • Just the other day I was reading a paper by our favorite fringe scientist Dr Puthoff. Unlike most scientists, he gets to speculate about earth shattering possibilities with no basis but how valuable it would be if it was true. So he has a fun job. [He might get lucky one day and then we'll all be eating crow!]

    In the paper he was talking about his new favorite topic, Zero Point Energy. ZPE is the natural energy of the vacuum that is required by QM to exist in order to satisfy the Uncertainty principle. Direct evidence of ZPE was shown a long time ago by a guy named Casimir, who has an effect named after him. Casimir reasoned that if you take two metal plates and put them next to each other with a small enough gap, parts of the frequencies of the zero point virtual particles wouldnt be able to 'virtually exist' because the gap was smaller than their wavelength, so the net effect is that the plates will be pulled together by the imbalance in virtual energy in the gap. And in fact this is well established fact.

    Now the ZPE guys say you can somehow harness this effect to get energy. The most brilliant idea is that maybe what holds the electron in its orbit is actually zero point energy being tapped by the electron in an analogous way as the Casimir effect. The electron effectively creates a region too narrow for all the frequencies of the vacuum to fit, so there is an energy differential which exactly holds the electron in orbit (where classical theory states it will eventually spiral into the nucleus).
    It is possible that this is true; Quantum mechanics describes how the atom works, but not why it works that way. This theory gives an explanation for that behavior.
    I believe it is this same theory that hydrinos are based upon; if you can manipulate the field near the nucleus of the atom just so, you may be able to find an new viable energy state for the atom, and in the transition, get some of the ZPE for free.
    This is a very exciting theory. Its the kind that makes you say Nobel Prize to the mirror. And of course thats the kind of stuff that these sorts of scientists are drawn to. Its like crack for them. And Mr Puthoff job is entirely to entertain these sorts of ideas. Good job if you can get it!
  • "...embraced by many engineers and people with deep pockets"

    There are no hydrinos for sale on eBay [ebay.com], so I guess those deep pockets bought them all already.

  • Take away all the science mumbo-jumbo and look at the working prototypes!

    All I want to know is ...Can I build a steam generator out of it and produce electricity cheaper!

    Maybe their science is good, maybe bad. I don't care, I just want cheap clean electricity without frying my gonads.

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