Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
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...
"...In many ways it sprang from slashdot." Because copying a story makes you responsible for the discovery of a theory that breaks modern physics.
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, too, didn't they?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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 :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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. (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.)
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 couple of things:
1) If memory serves correct, hydrogen ( hence Tritium ) never becomes a solid under normal pressure. It would need to be put under intense pressure to reach the solid state. It also will become metallic under these conditions.
2) If you think Tritium is expensive, just try to figure out how much anti-matter costs. Currently, it would work out to many Trillions of dollars per gram.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "