Journal of Applied Physics, NASA, and the Hydrino 247
Erik Baard writes "I wanted to bring you the last on a story that was slashdotted in June: NASA's investigation of the 'hydrino' rocket. In June I reported for wired.com that the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts was
funding a six-month study of rockets propeled by plasmas created by BlackLight Power Inc. The company claims that energy is released when it shrinks hydrogen atoms, bringing the electron closer into its nucleus than thought possible. Here's the scoop: the researcher told NASA that *something* was indeed generating plasmas with more kinetic energy than would be expected for the power input. And the kicker is that BlackLight founder Randell Mills scored a paper about his plasmas in the mainstream Journal of Applied Physics -- after a few years of following this bizarre startup, that floored me." Here's the Village Voice story with these updates.
reputed journal... Maybe.... (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as it sounds plausible then it gets published. Stringing enough buzz words together usually does the trick. Unfortunatly the science mags have gone the same way as the game review mags. Don't make waves or you don't get content and loose readership and advertising dollars.
Read the whole article at the Register [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Good to see a payoff for "bad" science finally (Score:4, Interesting)
btw who says the ether exists?
Re:Cold Nuclear Fusion Anybody? (Score:0, Interesting)
Except we need a revolution in atomic science to make sense of things. How come we can get over 200 completely unique elements with nothing more than three different subatomic particles? And while you're at it, how come they can form molecules that have nothing in common with any of the parent elements?
Oh, and as for "a source of clean and nearly limitless energy," that's something people have been working on for decades. It could be anything ranging from fusion to figuring out how to harness useful amounts of zero-point energy.
Reckless Disregard for the Truth (Score:2, Interesting)
With enemies like Park, Mills doesn't need friends. This is a really good way to get credibility with investors for Mills.
Re:Good to see a payoff for "bad" science finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Psychic powers? Oops, they went away when you walked in the room.
Psychic powers? Oops, we ignored basic sercuity cautions and let the subject cheat.
Psychic powers? Oops, it looks like we fudged our numbers.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive about their holy truths as any other two-bit religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we can make some real progress.
Because the odds of surviving cancer haven't steadily been going up. Because there's no drugs for people with HIV to hold back the virus. Because our movies all come on magnatic media, or long rolls of optical media. Because we have to search for a payphone when we need to make a phone call. Because slow mail or expensive phone calls are the only way for most Americans, Europeans and Japanese to communicate.
get back to the "real" work of investigating the universe *as it exists*, not as you believe it to exist.
Small enough circuits have quantum bleed-over, just like predicted by theory. Einstein's theory predicted gravitational lenses, just like they were found in real life. These theories describe the universe fairly well.
On the other hand, we've been seeing perpetual motion machines for how many centuries? And they never seem to work if and when we get our hands on them. How much work should a scientist spend studying something that's been disproved time and time again? When given something that seems bogus and is presented by someone with a financial motive, that doesn't correspond to the theories that are correct in every observation they made, the general trend is that it actually is bogus.
Here's another question: what do you do? Scientists would rather not go on what they feel will probably be a wild goose chase, instead working on stuff they feel will get results. I can hardly fault someone for making that decision - I try to avoid wasting my time myself. If you believe it has value, why don't you dedicate your time to studying it?
It gets better:... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just BlackLight Power's work in bombs, rockets, and rusty ships that has the military's attention. Mills has stacks of proprietary research on artificial intelligence. In what he calls Brain Child Systems, Mills has done the math for a reasoning machine with consciousness.
The more I read this guy, the more the hairs on my back stand straight.
My uncle had a saying, that I just can't keep out of my mind as I'm reading all this:
"Someone who knows everything knows nothing."
OhNo (Score:5, Interesting)
WHAT IS IT WITH YOU GUYS!!!
This guy is a con-artist taking you for a ride. Why are you feeding his ego. Utter nonsense!
If you actually read the NASA study, you will immediately see that there the amount of experimental evidence in NO WAY justifies any of the claims made. Excess power generation based on microwave heating of two different gas mixtures invalidates millions of REPEATABLE experiments conducted over the past 80 years? I DON'T THINK SO. Much more likely is that the adsorbtivity of the gases wasn't the same.
The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.
GIVE ME A BREAK.
Re:Should be lots of skepticm (Score:2, Interesting)
*(By a "Mislead Scientist" I mean decent people like Pons and Flieshman in their pursuit of cold fusion).
And if you think he looks funny, have a look at all of the coporate officers at http://www.blacklightpower.com/management.shtml
I could see them as pastors at a fundamentalist church involved in snakehandleing but I wouldn't want have them in company I was involved with.
Re:reputed journal... Maybe.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Journal of Applied Physics [aip.org]
That is indeed a refereed scientific journal, sponsored by the American Institute of Physics.
Perhaps you were merely being sarcastic and implying that JAP isn't a top tier journal. If so, remember to use your _SARCASM_ JAP rocks _/SARCASM_ tags or italicize something.
-Rothfuss
Crackpot Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Crackpot Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Because there are an infinity of false revolutionary "scientific" ideas possible. A scientist's job is to be skeptical, not credulous. Yes, scientists are "going where no man has split infinitives before" but they go there with intellectual rigor, not having sex with whatever has blue skin and big tits.
And this story, with the upcoming paper, just demonstrates that the system is working quite well.
If you think that scientists should be more interested in bizarre and revolutionary ideas, then you should spend some time in sci.relativity and sci.physics (just to name a couple of newsgroups) and see how many crazy, ignorant people with crazy, ignorant theories there really are out there who complain that "they're being persecuted" and "Einstein got bad grades and nobody believed him, either" (he didn't and they did).
Re:Good to see a payoff for "bad" science finally (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reckless Disregard for the Truth (Score:3, Interesting)
He's been one of the few scientists (or journalists) to call the administration on its missile defense bluff, among other things; he's also repeatedly described the ISS as a waste of time and money- though he's clearly in favor of space exploration. His opinion of creationism is about as low as can be imagined.
I'm sure the guy can be a dickhead, and I'm sure he can be wrong occasionally, but we need people like him. The mass media tends to give pseudoscientific bullshit far more credibility than it deserves, and too many legitimate scientists keep their mouths shut or ignore the problem. In a society where John Edwards is the SciFi channel's top rated show, skeptics are vital.
"Someone who knows everything knows nothing" (Score:1, Interesting)
Skepticism in science is fine as long as it's well-founded. Mills could very well be a genius; according to the Nordfelm Institute he's clocked in on the I-B scale at 155, which indicates genius-level intelligence. If you've ever known any geniuses, you'd know they're almost autistic in their thought-patterns. For him to conceive of the hydrino and novel methods of AI is not out of the bounds of possible reality. Sure, he could be a Nordfelm Institute-certified genius with an I-B scale IQ of 155 and a card-carrying member-on-file of the Mega Society who just happens to like lying about his inventions to make a profit, but I tend to believe him, having met him (and performed an independent background check on him prior to investing $86k in Blacklight).
The abundance of negativity towards this guy's ideas on Slashdot is really disenheartening. Park is as transparent a "goalie scientist" as I've ever seen. Did you know Park is directly responsible for the rejection of over 33 fuel injector and carb efficiency-incresing designs? Interesting, eh? What is Mills' motivation for wanting to scam the patent office and his investors? Do you really think it's possible for him to get away with $30M harvested from high-ranking DOE officials and CEOs? This guy is no Ken Lay, you'd know that if you met him. He's a scientist. He doesn't have the connections necessary to get away with a scam like this on such a large scale. And he's not deluded, either; I've had his patent-pending work privately reviewed by contracted experts (at cost of $23k per month for 6 months; I'm not bullshitting you when I express confidence in the scientific validity of his theories).
But believe what you will. Slashdot's archives will paint the naysayers as the Luddite-souled party-poopers that they are in the future. You guys are no better than Bill Joy.
Re:"Someone who knows everything knows nothing" (Score:1, Interesting)
By "genius" I mean "genius", not "really smart". Geniuses' brains do not work in the same way "really smart" people's brains do. Read Vodon's analysis of Einstein's brain segments, or, if you can find it, the dissertation titled _Capturing the Prodigy_ by Jane Blackwell Smith of Harvard (1997). Mills' brain is closer to autistic than "really smart". Trust me, I've spent days with the guy.
Quantum physics IS wrong, by the way... or at least incomplete to the point of being inconceivable and/or incoherent and therefore of minimal utility. "Quantum cryptography" and "quantum computing" and other practical-applications that allege dependence on the 'rules' of quantum physics are as dependent on quantum laws as fire is on phlogiston. As a 16-year researcher in the field in Triangle Park I can say this with a modicum of confidence, though I'm sure many will scoff. If you could only see Mills' work (that is, if Robert Park would stop playing patent-goalie for energy interests so the real meat could be published), you'd understand. He isn't discrediting centuries of work - and if he were, so what? Truth is what should matter to scientists, not sentimentality. Galileo and Einstein also discredited centuries of work with their achievements. But as I was saying, he isn't even doing that - all he's done is filled in gaps that took a genius' eye to determine their existence.
Speaking as one that has extensively reviewed Mills' actual work (first-hand and through private trusted proxy), as a scientist and as a businessman, I can say that what he's come up with - across the spectrum, not just with plasmas - could easily revolutionize our society. Dean Kamen's claims look ridiculous when you consider what Mills has accomplished (and reproduced) with solar power, femtotechnology, AI and energetic plasmas. If anything, Mills will go down in history as another Ernest Glitch, an overlooked achiever too visionary for his time. But hopefully Park and his energy masters won't be able to stop Mills from reaching the mainstream.