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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."
The concept of the hydrino -- hydrogen shrunk below its normal state
Sounds like a hydrogen atom took a dip in a cold swimming pool...
Oh wait...
...among NASA engineers? I get the feeling there is tension between scientists and engineers there.
-- SIGFPE
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.
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
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...
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
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know, I've often wondered about that... and why we don't see more of it.
The tritium gas lights in my watch are powered by beta emissions; of course, that's by direct stimulation of a phosphor... but still. A beta emitter emits a contant stream of negative charges.. why not use it?
Hmm. Tritium is a pure beta emitter. Anyone know what happens if you supercool tritium down to a solid (yeah I know it would be unbelievably completely rediculously expensive, Tritium being hte most expensive commercially available substance by mass already)
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.)
Osheroff is right. It's crackpottery.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This is neat, I never knew what a hydrino was before today.
The concept of a hydrino, sounds an awful lot like the concept behind minituration in the book/film Fantastic Voyage. Do I got it right?
If Black Light, Inc, really wants to make money off this, they should patent it, then tell the marks, "Invest in us! See, the US Patent Office likes it!" Can't lose.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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
At first glance, I thought it said "NASA to Investigate Hubris."
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Besides, if you want to run with the classical picture you described it still would not work because cannot have "two orbits per oscillation" because you run into a boundary problem. Any spot in this orbit would have two values of it's "height" unless the two "waves" were exactly on top of each other (which would get you back your original wave).
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).
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.
Wow, what a load of BS. So Einstein's search for a GUT was totally separate from his work in quantum mechanics and, let us not forget, relativity?
So this guy's GUT is probably crap, but maybe he'll get something useful out of it on the way. (Or maybe he's a total nuthead, I dunno, but this isn't grounds for dismissal.)
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
perhaps if we find some hydrinos, we could combine them with some dryinos and get pure energy?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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. "
Uhhh, unless your running some new theories, raising the atom above its normal state requires the input of energy, so THAT has energy stored. Hydrino's (theoretically) are in a lower state than hydrogen, so for them to be made, that energy would need to be lost. So no energy storage.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
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.
This guy maybe totally wrong but at least he is actually saying no I will try something else.. What if plank or einstein had never assume quantisation (ignoring boltzman and some statistical mecahnics) they assumed something everybody thought at the time was nuts. Now every physics student learns QM.
Maybe in 2102 we will look back and say wow those QM papers were silly
Just the other day I was reading a paper by our favorite fringe scientist Dr Puthoff. Unlike most scientists, he gets to speculate about earth shattering possibilities with no basis but how valuable it would be if it was true. So he has a fun job. [He might get lucky one day and then we'll all be eating crow!]
In the paper he was talking about his new favorite topic, Zero Point Energy. ZPE is the natural energy of the vacuum that is required by QM to exist in order to satisfy the Uncertainty principle. Direct evidence of ZPE was shown a long time ago by a guy named Casimir, who has an effect named after him. Casimir reasoned that if you take two metal plates and put them next to each other with a small enough gap, parts of the frequencies of the zero point virtual particles wouldnt be able to 'virtually exist' because the gap was smaller than their wavelength, so the net effect is that the plates will be pulled together by the imbalance in virtual energy in the gap. And in fact this is well established fact.
Now the ZPE guys say you can somehow harness this effect to get energy. The most brilliant idea is that maybe what holds the electron in its orbit is actually zero point energy being tapped by the electron in an analogous way as the Casimir effect. The electron effectively creates a region too narrow for all the frequencies of the vacuum to fit, so there is an energy differential which exactly holds the electron in orbit (where classical theory states it will eventually spiral into the nucleus).
It is possible that this is true; Quantum mechanics describes how the atom works, but not why it works that way. This theory gives an explanation for that behavior.
I believe it is this same theory that hydrinos are based upon; if you can manipulate the field near the nucleus of the atom just so, you may be able to find an new viable energy state for the atom, and in the transition, get some of the ZPE for free.
This is a very exciting theory. Its the kind that makes you say Nobel Prize to the mirror. And of course thats the kind of stuff that these sorts of scientists are drawn to. Its like crack for them. And Mr Puthoff job is entirely to entertain these sorts of ideas. Good job if you can get it!
> 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
That's still hydrogen becoming solid. And yes, it is metallic. Remember, Hydrogen sits on both sides of the periodic table.
You will note I said "Most expensive commercially available substance."
Last I checked, you cannot purchase antimatter.
You CAN, however, easily purchase tritium.