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===July 2012 Update of Mills' Book===
On July 12, 2012, eight days after scientists at ] formally announced findings of recent experiments designed to measure the mass of a hypothetical fundamental particle dubbed the ], which is hypothesized to be involved in the single mechanism by which mass is endowed to other fundamental particles, ] published an updated version of ''The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics'' (GUT-CP). The update consisted of two pages added to the end of Chapter 37 giving a new section of the book called "Intermediate Vector and Higgs Boson".<ref name="GUT-CP"/> The general nature of the update is that it establishes a separate explanation for the presence of ~125-126 GeV ] in the 2-photon channel of the particle detector which, if proven to be correct, would invalidate the part of the ] that requires a real particle, the Higgs Boson, to have a mass approximately equal to the mean experimental energy such that the presence of key photons in the detectors are due to ] of the Higgs Boson and not some other process. Mills is essentially arguing that GUT-CP provides an explanation for the detected energies that is not in any physical way associated to the decay of a "real" Higgs Boson particle. The new text also establishes similar explanations for the non-existence of the +/- W and Z bosons, which according to the Standard Model are intimately related to the Higgs particle.


===Experiments=== ===Experiments===

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Blacklight Power Inc.
Company logo
FoundedHydroCatalysis Inc. in 1991.
FounderRandell L. Mills
Headquarters493 Old Trenton Rd.
Cranbury, NJ, USA
Number of employees20 fulltime, 14 consultants
Subsidiaries"Millsian, Inc".
WebsiteBlacklightPower.com

Blacklight Power, Inc. (BLP) of Cranbury, New Jersey is a company founded by Randell L. Mills who claims to have discovered a new energy source. The new energy source is based on Mills' theory that a hydrogen atom energy level can drop below the ground state, contradicting the definition of ground state. Mills calls the theoretical hydrogen atoms that are in an energy state below ground level, "hydrinos". BLP has created a system it calls Catalyst Induced Hydrino Transition, or CIHT. Mills self-published a closely related book The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, August 2011 ed. (GUT-CP).

Steven Chu, the current United States Secretary of Energy, said "it's extremely unlikely that this is real, and I feel sorry for the funders, the people who are backing this". Bob Park, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland and notable skeptic of dubious claims writes, "There is no independent scientific confirmation of the hydrino, and BLP has a patent problem. So they have nothing to sell but bull shit. The company is therefore dependent on investors with deep pockets and shallow brains."

Company

Randell Mills, the founder and CEO of Blacklight Power, received a degree in Chemistry from Franklin & Marshall College in 1982, and later studied biotechnology and electrical engineering at MIT, and graduated from Harvard Medical School. Claiming a potential power source that "represents a boundless form of new primary energy" and that will "replace all forms of fuel in the world," he founded the company in 1991 as HydroCatalysis Inc. It was later renamed to Blacklight Power Inc. By 2000 Mills raised $25 million in funding for the company, recruiting several researchers to sit on the board, which subsequently included representatives of venture capital firms and as well as a former CEO of Westinghouse, and an ex-deputy director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Mills is the chairman of the board, president and CEO. Former directors of the company have included turnaround expert Michael H. Jordan and General Merrill McPeak.

By 2009 BLP had raised about $60 million in venture capital, and claims to have commercial agreements to license BLP energy technology for the production of thermal or electric power to utilities and private corporations. Mills envisions that CIHT (Catalyst-Induced-Hydrino-Transition) cell stacks can provide power for long-range electric vehicles, a claim described as "scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state" by Wolfgang Ketterle. Mills claims this electricity will cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to an 8.9 cents per kilowatt-hour national average. In 2010 the company claimed that "CIHT technology was independently confirmed by Dr. K.V. Ramanujachary, Rowan University Meritorious Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry". This was based on company-funded experiments by Rowan University researchers and a scientist consulting for GEN3 partners, all conducted with BLP direct involvement and which remain unpublished in peer reviewed journals.

IEEE Spectrum magazine listed Blacklight as a "loser" technology in its 2009 report because "Most experts don’t believe such lower states exist, and they say the experiments don’t present convincing evidence."

A subsidiary formed in June 2006 as Molegos Inc. and renamed as Millsian in October 2006, offers a molecular-modeling software-application based on "CQM" theory.

Patents

BLP holds several patents based on graphic modelling software, and a "molecular hydrogen laser". They have struggled with others. A 2000 patent based on its hydrino-related technology was later withdrawn later by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) due to contradictions with known physics laws and other concerns about the viability of the described processes. A mocking column by Robert L. Park and an outside query by an unknown person prompted Group Director Kepplinger to review this new patent himself. Kepplinger said that his "main concern was the proposition that the applicant was claiming the electron going to a lower orbital in a fashion that I knew was contrary to the known laws of physics and chemistry", and that the patent appeared to involve cold fusion and perpetual motion. He contacted another Director, Robert Spar, who also expressed doubts on the patentability of the patent application. This caused the USPTO to withdraw from issue the patent application before it was granted and re-open it for review, and to withdraw four related applications, including one for a hydrino power plant. One of the four applications was so near to issuance that it appeared in the USPTO's Gazzette as US 6,030,601 . Blacklight filed suit in the US District Court of Columbia, saying that withdrawal of the application after having paid the fee was contrary to law. In 2002 the District Court concluded that the USPTO was acting inside the limits of its authority in withdrawing a patent over whose validity it had doubts, and later that year the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ratified this decision. Applications were rejected by the UK patent office for similar reasons. The European Patent Office (EPO) rejected a similar BLP patent application due to lack of clarity on how the process worked. Reexamination of this European patent is pending.

Theory and claims

One of the motivations for developing its novel theory of physics was to find "physical laws that are exact on all scales", thereby " the limitations of quantum mechanics". Starting with basic principles of Conservation of mass-energy and of linear and angular momentum, Maxwell's Equations, Newton's Laws and Lorentz transforms of Special Relativity, Mills aimed to develop highly predictive applications of Maxwell's equations that precisely predict fundamental spectral observations in exact equations with no adjustable parameters. Mills claims that chemicals, under controlled experiments, may react catalytically with atomic hydrogen to generate an "ultraviolet plasma". The company claims that the special plasma byproducts predicted by GUT-CP, called "hydrinos", have been experimentally observed to have an energy state below what quantum mechanics refers to as the ground state of hydrogen.

Mills first announced his hydrino state theory on April 25, 1991 in a press conference in Lancaster, as an explanation for the cold fusion phenomena that had been reported in 1989. According to Mills, no fusion was actually happening in the cells: all the effects would be caused by the hydrogen atoms which shrunk as they fell to a state lower than the ground state of hydrogen. The increased proximity between the shrunk atoms would cause them to fuse sporadically. Some of those atoms would be deuterium atoms (a hydrogen atom with one extra neutron), which would explain why there were occasional readings of neutrons. No experimental evidence was offered by Mills. Mills claims that much of standard particle physics, while having experimental validation, should be rejected due to its reliance on overfitting.

Model of the free and bound electron

Mills claims that the electron is an extended particle or membrane that in free space would consist of a flat disk of spinning charge. Mills' model for the bound electron treats the electron not as a point nor as a probability wave, but as a "dynamic spherical shell" of zero thickness surrounding the nucleus. The resulting model, called the "orbitsphere", is claimed to provide a fully classical physical explanation for phenomena including quantization of angular momentum and magnetic moment. The model is not restricted to the integer orbitals of the hydrogen atom described by the Bohr model and calculated from Schrödinger's equation but is claimed to allow the existence of fractional integer orbitals. Mills' model is claimed to derive "classical" orbitals from the classical nonradiation condition defined by Hermann A. Haus in 1986.

Blacklight process

According to Mills, a specific chemical process he calls "The BlackLight Process" allows a bound electron to fall to energy states below what quantum theory predicts to be possible. In the hydrogen atom, these states are postulated to have an effective radius of 1/p of the ground state radius, with p being limited by the speed of light to a positive integer less than or equal to 137. He terms these below-ground hydrogen atoms 'hydrinos'. Mills' mechanism consists of a non-radiative energy transfer between a hydrogen atom and a catalyst that is capable of absorbing a certain amount of energy. The total energy Mills says is released for hydrino transitions is large compared to the chemical burning of hydrogen, but less than nuclear reactions. Mills claims that limitations on confinement and terrestrial conditions have prevented the achievement of hydrino states below 1/30, which would correspond to an energy release of approximately 15 keV per hydrogen atom.

July 2012 Update of Mills' Book

On July 12, 2012, eight days after scientists at CERN formally announced findings of recent experiments designed to measure the mass of a hypothetical fundamental particle dubbed the Higgs Boson, which is hypothesized to be involved in the single mechanism by which mass is endowed to other fundamental particles, Blacklight Power published an updated version of The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics (GUT-CP). The update consisted of two pages added to the end of Chapter 37 giving a new section of the book called "Intermediate Vector and Higgs Boson". The general nature of the update is that it establishes a separate explanation for the presence of ~125-126 GeV photons in the 2-photon channel of the particle detector which, if proven to be correct, would invalidate the part of the Standard Model that requires a real particle, the Higgs Boson, to have a mass approximately equal to the mean experimental energy such that the presence of key photons in the detectors are due to particle decay of the Higgs Boson and not some other process. Mills is essentially arguing that GUT-CP provides an explanation for the detected energies that is not in any physical way associated to the decay of a "real" Higgs Boson particle. The new text also establishes similar explanations for the non-existence of the +/- W and Z bosons, which according to the Standard Model are intimately related to the Higgs particle.

Experiments

  • February 1996: NASA published the paper, "Replication of the apparent excess heat effect in light water-potassium carbonate-nickel-electrolytic cell" by Janis M. Niedra, et al. The paper describes experiments done with a 28 liter electrolytic cell on loan from Hydrocatalysis Power Corporation (as BLP was known at the time). The experiments described in the paper did not recreate the large heat gains reported for the cell by BLP however unexplained power gains in the cell ranging from 1.06 to 1.68 of the input power were reported. Speculation on the causes of this excess power was included in the "Summary and Conclusions" section of the paper. From that section: "Although our data admits the existence of an unusual source of heat with the cell, it falls far short of being compelling" and "Following the principle of simplest explanation that fits the data on hand, recombination becomes the explanation of choice".
  • January 4, 2005: Šišović et al. published a paper describing experimental data and analysis of the Mills' theory that a resonant transfer model (RTM) explains the excessive Doppler broadening of the Hα line. Šišović et al. concluded that: "The detected large excessive broadening in pure hydrogen and in Ne–H2 mixture is in agreement with CM and other experimental results" and that "These results can’t be explained by RTM". The collision model explanation for excessive broadening of the Hα line is based on established physics.

Analysis of Mills' models

  • September 26, 2005: The Journal of Applied Physics published a critique by A. V. Phelps of the 2004 article, "Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas" by J. Phillips, R. Mills and X. Chen. Phelps criticized both the calorimetric techniques and the underlying theory described in the Phillips/Mills/Chen article. The Journal of Applied Physics published a response to the critique by Phillips on the same day.
  • 2006: Norman Dombey concluded that Mill's theory of hydrino states is "unphysical". According to Dombey, the hydrino states would require:
  1. non-relativistic counterparts to remain physical, but they don't have them.
  2. compatibility with a coupling strength (fine structure constant) equal to zero to remain physical, yet "hydrino states" seem to exist in the absence of any coupling strength.
  3. binding strength that falls with the coupling strength. The hydrino model predicts that binding strength for hydrino states increases as the coupling strength falls, rendering the states unphysical.
  • April 2007: Antonio Di Castro showed that the states below the ground state, as described in Mills' theory, are incompatible with the Schrödinger, Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations."
  • May 1, 2008: The Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics published an article by Hans-Joachim Kunze critical of the 2003 paper authored by R. Mills and P. Ray, Extreme ultraviolet spectroscopy of helium–hydrogen. Hans-Joachim Kunze is professor emeritus at the Institute for Experimental Physics V Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. The abstract of the article is: "It is suggested that spectral lines, on which the fiction of fractional principal quantum numbers in the hydrogen atom is based, are nothing else but artefacts." Kunze stated that it was impossible to detect the novel lines below 30 nm reported by Mills and Ray because the equipment they used did not have the capability to detect them as per the manufacturer and as per "every book on vacuum-UV spectroscopy" and "therefore the observed lines must be artefacts". Kunze also stated that: "The enormous spectral widths of the novel lines point to artefacts, too."

Commentaries

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"Unlike most schemes for free energy, the hydrino process of Randy Mills is not without ample theory (WN 8 Jan 99). Mills has written a 1000 page tome, entitled, "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics," that takes the reader all the way from hydrinos to antigravity (WN 9 May 97). Fortunately, Aaron Barth (not to be confused with Erik Baard, the Randy Mills' apologist), has taken upon himself to look through it, checking for accuracy. Barth is a post doctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute, and holds a PhD in Astronomy, 1998, from UC, Berkeley. What he found initially were mathematical blunders and unjustified assumptions. To his surprise, however, portions of the book seemed well organized. These, it now turns out, were lifted verbatim from various texts. This has been the object of a great deal of discussion from Mills' Hydrino Study Group. Mills seems not to understand what the fuss is all about." - Park

  • 2007: In a review of cold fusion research, Edmund Storms, a cold fusion researcher, concluded that the hydrino model provides a possible explanation for cold fusion.

"BlackLight Power (BLP), founded 17 years ago as HydroCatalysis, announced last week that the company had successfully tested a prototype power system that would generate 50 KW of thermal power. BLP anticipates delivery of the new power system in 12 to 18 months. The BLP process, (WN 26 Apr 91) , discovered by Randy Mills, is said to coax hydrogen atoms into a "state below the ground state," called the "hydrino." There is no independent scientific confirmation of the hydrino, and BLP has a patent problem. So they have nothing to sell but bull shit. The company is therefore dependent on investors with deep pockets and shallow brains." - Park

References

  1. ^ Robert L. Park (26 April 1991). "What's New Friday, 26 April 1991 Washington, DC". and Robert L. Park (31 October 2008). "What's New Friday, October 31, 2008".
  2. ^ Jacqueline A. Newmyer (May 17, 2000). "Academics Question The Science Behind BlackLight Power, Inc". Harvard Crimson. Retrieved February 10, 2009.
  3. "BlackLight Power Company Facilities". BlackLight Power. Retrieved 2012-05-26.
  4. ^ http://www.blacklightpower.com/ Official site
  5. "Commercial Applications of the Hydrino". Retrieved 2011-11-18.
  6. ^ Mills, Randell L. (2011). "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, August 2011 ed" (DjVu). Blacklight Power. Retrieved 2012-05-26. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) (Self-published)
  7. Hydrinos offer cheap power - and a car that gets 1,500 miles on a liter of water - CNN iReport
  8. ^ Park, Bob (6 June 2008). "Hydrinos: How long can a really dumb idea survive?". What's New?. University of Maryland. Retrieved 2010-12-04.
  9. Erik Baard (December 21, 1999). "Quantum Leap: Dr. Randell Mills says he can change the face of physics. The Scientfic Establishment thinks he's nuts". The Village Voice. Retrieved February 10, 2009.
  10. Gerard Wynn (September 3, 2000). "Sweet dreams are made of geoengineering". Reuters. Retrieved October 15, 2009.
  11. Management | BLP
  12. Lohr, Steve (2010-05-26). "Michael H. Jordan, Turnaround Expert, Dies at 73". The New York Times.
  13. ^ Mina Kimes (2008-07-29). "BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water". CNNMoney.comTemplate:Inconsistent citations{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  14. "Merrill A. McPeak Profile". Corporate Executives and Directors Directory. Forbes. Retrieved 28 September 2011.
  15. ^ Morrison, Chris (2008-10-21). "Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source". New York Times.
  16. "BlackLight Power, Inc. Announces First Commercial License in Europe with GEOENERGIE SpA, Energy Subsidiary of Geogreen". Retrieved 2012-05-26.
  17. ^ Erico Guizzo (January 2009). "Loser: Hot or Not?". IEEE Spectrum.
  18. "BlackLight Power, Inc. Announces Production of Electricity from a New Form of Hydrogen". 2010-11-29. Retrieved 2012-05-26.
  19. "Millsian". Millsian. Official site
  20. Chris Morrison (2008-05-30). "Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water — is this for real?". VentureBeat. US 7188033 US 7689367 
  21. US 7773656 
  22. US 6024935  "Lower-energy hydrogen methods and structures"
  23. US 6024935 , 6,024,935, Lower-energy hydrogen methods and structures, February 15, 2000, retrieved 11 February 2011
  24. ^ Erik Baard (25th April 2000). "The Empire Strikes Back. Alternative-Energy Scientist Fights to Save Patent". Village VoiceTemplate:Inconsistent citations {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  25. ^ Rimmer, Matthew (2011). "Patenting free energy: the BlackLight litigation and the hydrogen economy". Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. 6 (6): 374. doi:10.1093/jiplp/jpr010Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  26. ^ Patent nonsense: court denies Blacklight Power appeal, What's New, Robert Park, September 6, 2002
  27. United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. "Blacklight Power, Inc. v. James E. Rogan".
  28. Brendan Coffey (2000-05-15). "Follow-Through. Weird Science". Forbes.
  29. UK-IPO decisions "O/114/08". and "O/076/08".
  30. "Blacklight Power Inc v Comptroller-General of Patents [2008] EWHC 2763 (Pat); [2008] WLR (D) 360". 2008-11-18.
  31. Gale R Peterson, Derrick A Pizarro, Practising Law Institute (2003). 2003 Federal Circuit Yearbook: Patent Law Developments in the Federal Circuit. Practising Law Institute. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-87224-443-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  32. "UK-IPO decision O/170/09".
  33. E. Sheldon (September–October 2008). "An overview of almost 20 years' research on cold fusion". Contemporary Physics. 49 (5): 375–378. Bibcode:2008ConPh..49..375S. doi:10.1080/00107510802465229. , which involves a nowadays widely discredited 'hydrino' model that was proposed in 1991 to account for the excess heat observations in 'cold fusion' studies. (...) , is contrary to conventional quantum principles and unacceptable to me or to the general theoretical-physics community.
  34. Robert L. Park (2002). Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud (illustrated, reprint ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 133–135. ISBN 0-19-860443-2, 9780198604433. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  35. William J. Broad (1991-04-26). "2 Teams Put New Life in 'Cold' Fusion Theory". New York Times.
  36. Mills, Randell L. (2008). "Exact classical quantum mechanical solution for atomic helium which predicts conjugate parameters from a unique solution for the first time" (PDF). Phys. Essays. 21 (2): 103. Bibcode:2008PhyEs..21..103M. doi:10.4006/1.3009282. The Dirac equation does not reconcile this situation. Many additional shortcomings arise such as instability to radiation, negative kinetic energy states, intractable infinities, virtual particles at every point in space, self-interaction, the Klein paradox, violation of Einstein causality, and 'spooky' action at a distance. Despite its successes, quantum mechanics (QM) has remained mysterious to all who have encountered it. Starting with Bohr and progressing into the present, the departure from intuitive, physical reality has widened. The connection between quantum mechanics and reality is more than just a "philosophical" issue. It reveals that quantum mechanics is not a correct or complete theory of the physical world and that inescapable internal inconsistencies and incongruities arise when attempts are made to treat it as a physical as opposed to a purely mathematical 'tool.'
  37. Haus, Hermann A. (1986). "On the radiation from point charges". American Journal of Physics. 54 (12): 1126. Bibcode:1986AmJPh..54.1126H. doi:10.1119/1.14729.
  38. Randell L. Mills (2008-01-21). "Physical solutions of the nature of the atom, photon, and their interactions to form excited and predicted hydrino states" (PDF). BlackLight Power. Retrieved 2012-05-26. (self published)
  39. Niedra, Janis M.; Myers, Ira T.; Fralick, Gustave C.; Baldwin, Richard S. (February 1996). "Replication of the apparent excess heat effect in light water-potassium carbonate-nickel-electrolytic cell" (PDF). OSTI 236808.
  40. Šišović, N. M.; Majstorović, G. Lj.; Konjević, N. (4 January 2005). "Excessive hydrogen and deuterium Balmer lines broadening in a hollow cathode glow discharges". European Physical Journal D-Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Plasma Physics. 32 (3): 347–354. Bibcode:2005EPJD...32..347S. doi:10.1140/epjd/e2004-00192-1.
  41. Phelps, A.V. (2005-10-02). "Comment on 'Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas'". Journal of Applied Physics. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
  42. Phillips, Jonathan (2005-10-02). "Response to "Comment on 'Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas'". Journal of Apllied Physics. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
  43. Dombey, Norman (8 August 2006). "The hydrino and other unlikely states". Physics Letters A. 360: 62. arXiv:physics/0608095. Bibcode:2006PhLA..360...62D. doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2006.07.069.
  44. de Castro, Antonio S. (4 April 2007). "Orthogonality criterion for banishing hydrino states from standard quantum mechanics". Physics Letters A. 369 (5–6): 380. arXiv:0704.0631. Bibcode:2007PhLA..369..380D. doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2007.05.006.
  45. "Ruhr-Universität Bochum information page on Hans-Joachim Kunze". Ruhr-Universität. Retrieved 2011-02-20.
  46. Kunze, H-J (2008). "On the spectroscopic measurements used to support the postulate of states with fractional principal quantum numbers in hydrogen". J Phys D: Appl. Phys. 41 (10): 108001. Bibcode:2008JPhD...41j8001K. doi:10.1088/0022-3727/41/10/108001.
  47. Park, Bob (27 October 2000). "Blackout: Where do ideas like these come from?". University of Maryland. Retrieved 2009-03-02.
  48. Storms, Edmund (2007). Science of low energy nuclear reaction: a comprehensive compilation of evidence and explanations. Singapore: World Scientific. p. 184. ISBN 981-270-620-8.

External links

Corporate website

Commentaries by Critic Bob Park

General media

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