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."
My first thought was the Schrodinger equation - 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.
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 living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Even if the hydrino theory is bogus, let's use valid arguments.
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.
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.