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NASA to Investigate Hydrinos
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."
I'm not sure if this is a troll . . . why wouldn't rockets work in space? To put it in the simplest terms possible: throw something out the back of the ship, the ship accelerates forward due to conservation of momentum.
stipe42
I'm not sure of this is a troll but . . . why wouldn't rockets work in space? A rocket in simplest terms possible: throw something out the back, the rocket accelerates forward due to conservation of momentum.
stipe42
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.
Find free books.
Rockets are being looked at not because it wouldn't work in space, but because hydrinos presents a much higher amount of potential power.
More power means more thrust.
If Hydrinos exist and can work in a rocket, then it has far reaching effects in terms of space travel.
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.
Energy: time to change the picture.
??? Ion engines work fine thank you very much
Boeing even sold one of them for comerical use, so it might even be considered out of R&D and into present tech stage.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
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.
Veramocor
And don't forget that the best theory ever developed, Quantum ElectroDynamics (QED), which is experimentally verified out to umpteen decimal places (twelve, really), is the one that also describes the hydrogen atom bound states.
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.
The BlackLight Rocket link on Wired isn't slashdotted, it's just wrong. Here's the real page and a much more informative writeup of the whole concept at space.com, April 2000 , where Wired seems to have gotten most of their story. Sigh.
I've read everything that's come out of BLP for the last four years. I suggest this paper 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.
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.
Then there's the issue of basic credibility. A while back, on the discussion group on yahoo about this subject, someone brought up the subject that Mills's book is chock full of plagiarism. There are apparently large passages just cut and pasted straight from various physics textbooks into Mills's book. So we're dealing with a guy who does not seem to think he's bound by the normal standards of academic decency.
> What...it would be too easy for me if you just
> told me what "high public science position" he
> holds? I wouldn't have "earned" the right to
> know if somebody just tells me? Why should I
> have to spend my time hunting through the
> website for this guy's info? His quote would
> have a lot more credibility if his "high public
> science position" were listed with his name.
Sorry about that. Dr. Peter Zimmerman is a chief science advisor with the U.S. Senate and has a Ph.D. in Physics along with years of hard-earned laboratory research experience. He participates regulary in the Hydrino Study Group discussions because that is his only opportunity to challenge publicly Mills' assertions. However, his participation is not part of his "official" job with the government, so he did not want his job title listed on the http://www.hydrino.org web site.
> I stand by my earlier statement. The quote (or
> misquote...or out of context quote?) is placed
> on the front page because it protrays the
> scientific community as a cult of elitist snobs
> (the "elementary" concepts line) whose debating
> skills are limited to appeals to authority
> ("Mills [read David] places himself squarely in
> opposition to the greatist theoritcal minds
> [read Goliath]"). If somebody actually said
> this in an attempt to argue against the
> existence of Hydrinos, he has done a disservice
> to the side of the debate he claims to be on.
The two quotes resulted from a long, exasperating, back-and-forth dialogue between Mills and Zimmerman a year or so ago. As the list moderator, I finally called a "time out" to ask both these men about their fundamental assumptions of the nature of the universe. The quotes you see on the front page are their responses.
I am sorry you are not happy with the quote selections nor with the absence of a brief job title for Dr. Zimmerman. But I hope you at least understand now how we came to post that material as written.
You may search the list archives using the search box at the bottom of the front page at http://www.hydrino.org to gain more insight into the Mills-Zimmerman exchanges.
Luke Setzer
Hydrino Study Group Webmaster and Moderator
http://www.hydrino.org