Journal of Applied Physics, NASA, and the Hydrino

Erik Baard writes "I wanted to bring you the last on a story that was slashdotted in June: NASA's investigation of the 'hydrino' rocket. In June I reported for wired.com that the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts was funding a six-month study of rockets propeled by plasmas created by BlackLight Power Inc. The company claims that energy is released when it shrinks hydrogen atoms, bringing the electron closer into its nucleus than thought possible. Here's the scoop: the researcher told NASA that *something* was indeed generating plasmas with more kinetic energy than would be expected for the power input. And the kicker is that BlackLight founder Randell Mills scored a paper about his plasmas in the mainstream Journal of Applied Physics -- after a few years of following this bizarre startup, that floored me." Here's the Village Voice story with these updates.

Comments

Re:Should be lots of skepticm

[Guppy06]

• "The company is named "Blacklight Power""
  • All the really cool names like "Lockheed-Martin" are already taken.
  • If you weren't spending money on start-ups with silly names several decades ago, you would have missed the opportunity to invest in General Atomics.
• The guy looks funny in that lab jacket.
  • It's the guys that don't look funny in a lab jacket that worry me.
• "Most of the scientific community finds these theories "crackpot ideas"."
  • So? We should all be more concerned with what the scientific method has to say about his ideas, not the "community."
  • If we don't, we'd be no better than the Catholics who locked up Galileo.

"He's raised 30 million dollars."

• 99.99% of which did not come from Slashdot users.
  • If we're not monetarily involved, what's wrong with a little cheerleading?
  
  

Re:Good to see a payoff for "bad" science finally

[Monkelectric]

Im 100% with you on this one. The guy has a weird ass phenomenon and a theroy about why it happens. Other people are trying to verify it. Thats pretty much science in a nutshell.

It the theroy isn't verified, thats science to. Also, there is no harm in trying to do something with the phenomenon even if we don't understand it. I think its likely that the guy might be able to make something usefull and *have no clue* why it works. Electricity was being used and studied 100 years before we had a clue what it was.

Re:reputed journal... Maybe....

[adminispheroid]

Since I've been in the position of peer reviewing similar journals, I have some sympathy for people who let through results that are obviously wrong. Here's why: with a result that's based on an experiment, nobody expects the reviewer to go repeat the experiment. If somebody writes a paper that clearly describes an experiment, says they checked everything they should have checked and made all the calculations they should have, and comes up with a "surprising" result, it'll get published. And if you think about it, this is how it should be. If other people repeat the experiment and get the same answer, then it's right. And if everybody else gets a different answer, then we all know the original author is an ass.

I don't fault the journal for publishing this trash, but I certainly fault NASA for funding it.

Re:OhNo

[meringuoid]

The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.

NASA have a small project called the Breakthrough Physics Program whose job it is to give credible-sounding crackpots a go, on the offchance that one of them might be right. It's Pascal's Wager - though the chances of one of them being right are minimal, if one actually IS then the payoff is immense.

So NASA pick up this Blacklight bloke who is peddling a perpetual motion machine that flatly contradicts the most accurate scientific model ever constructed of any system (the quantum-mechanical model of the hydrogen atom) and give him a fair go. They perform a few experiments to test his claims, and in the end they say 'Meh. Well, maybe, kind of, sorta, but not so as you'd notice. Results inconclusive.'

Thing is, they have to say 'inconclusive'. If they didn't, they'd have to explain to their bosses why they've just spent a good deal of taxpayers' money on snake oil, and their funding is at risk. So they return the Scottish verdict, they stay in work, and the snake oil peddler goes away claiming that NASA scientists endorse his scheme and that the only reason they said 'inconclusive' was because Big Oil made them cover it up.

Re:subtract JAP publications

[Idarubicin]

Having a quick look at impact factors (IF) for a few journals, I was surprised to note that papers in JAP (IF ~2.2) are more likely to be cited (taken collectively) than papers in any of Phil. Mag. A, B, or Lett. (IF 1.8, 1.2, and 1.5, respectively.) IF should never be used by itself to measure the quality or importance of a journal.

Still, if you're purely interested in getting cited (for good or bad) JAP is a better bet. Now, some of those citations may be self-referential, and some may be refutations. Really, though, they're all third-tier journals. Phys. Rev. Lett. is definitely more prestigious, based on reputation and IF (6.46). I would lump it in loosely with the second-tier journals. The top-tier journals (for physics discoveries) are almost universally considered to be Science (IF 23.9) and Nature (IF 25.8). These last two are in a class by themselves.

So what's the point of all this? Usually there is some correlation between the scientific importance of an article and the level of journal in which it is published. I have published a paper in a third-tier journal. It was good science and solid data, but not a particularly important result. I was happy with that--people in my field could find it and appreciate it, and I wasn't wasting too many people's time with something rather obscure.

Any author will prefer a paper in Nature to a paper in a journal from one of the lower tiers. Shrinking hydrogen atoms has just the sort of gee-whiz factor appeal that journals (and their readers) love. Further, it suggests a new realm of science. Consequently, if the author in question had solid supporting data then he would have a paper in Nature right now. You need three things for a top-flight journal article: an interesting topic, an interesting result, and rock-solid data. He's got the first two. To quote Carl Sagan:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Looks like that (admittedly and appropriately high) bar has not been passed.