Slashdot Mirror
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.
I would take the publishing of a science paper these days with a grain of salt. The register just did some ground breaking reporting in this area for another company like this and found out that the state of peer review at most of these mags is poor at best.
As long as it sounds plausible then it gets published. Stringing enough buzz words together usually does the trick. Unfortunatly the science mags have gone the same way as the game review mags. Don't make waves or you don't get content and loose readership and advertising dollars.
Read the whole article at the Register
Papa Legba come and open the gate
For every ground breaking discovery there are a million crackpots. Scientists have plenty of reasons to be sceptic. Once this guy is able topower a space heater with his plasma they will have to believe him.
btw who says the ether exists?
"Saddly, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is..."
Except we need a revolution in atomic science to make sense of things. How come we can get over 200 completely unique elements with nothing more than three different subatomic particles? And while you're at it, how come they can form molecules that have nothing in common with any of the parent elements?
Oh, and as for "a source of clean and nearly limitless energy," that's something people have been working on for decades. It could be anything ranging from fusion to figuring out how to harness useful amounts of zero-point energy.
With enemies like Park, Mills doesn't need friends. This is a really good way to get credibility with investors for Mills.
Seastead this.
many self-righteous so-called "scientists" have this incredible fear of anything outside their understanding. Meteorites? They don't exist,
Psychic powers? Oops, they went away when you walked in the room.
Psychic powers? Oops, we ignored basic sercuity cautions and let the subject cheat.
Psychic powers? Oops, it looks like we fudged our numbers.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive about their holy truths as any other two-bit religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we can make some real progress.
Because the odds of surviving cancer haven't steadily been going up. Because there's no drugs for people with HIV to hold back the virus. Because our movies all come on magnatic media, or long rolls of optical media. Because we have to search for a payphone when we need to make a phone call. Because slow mail or expensive phone calls are the only way for most Americans, Europeans and Japanese to communicate.
get back to the "real" work of investigating the universe *as it exists*, not as you believe it to exist.
Small enough circuits have quantum bleed-over, just like predicted by theory. Einstein's theory predicted gravitational lenses, just like they were found in real life. These theories describe the universe fairly well.
On the other hand, we've been seeing perpetual motion machines for how many centuries? And they never seem to work if and when we get our hands on them. How much work should a scientist spend studying something that's been disproved time and time again? When given something that seems bogus and is presented by someone with a financial motive, that doesn't correspond to the theories that are correct in every observation they made, the general trend is that it actually is bogus.
Here's another question: what do you do? Scientists would rather not go on what they feel will probably be a wild goose chase, instead working on stuff they feel will get results. I can hardly fault someone for making that decision - I try to avoid wasting my time myself. If you believe it has value, why don't you dedicate your time to studying it?
It's not just BlackLight Power's work in bombs, rockets, and rusty ships that has the military's attention. Mills has stacks of proprietary research on artificial intelligence. In what he calls Brain Child Systems, Mills has done the math for a reasoning machine with consciousness.
The more I read this guy, the more the hairs on my back stand straight.
My uncle had a saying, that I just can't keep out of my mind as I'm reading all this:
"Someone who knows everything knows nothing."
WHAT IS IT WITH YOU GUYS!!!
This guy is a con-artist taking you for a ride. Why are you feeding his ego. Utter nonsense!
If you actually read the NASA study, you will immediately see that there the amount of experimental evidence in NO WAY justifies any of the claims made. Excess power generation based on microwave heating of two different gas mixtures invalidates millions of REPEATABLE experiments conducted over the past 80 years? I DON'T THINK SO. Much more likely is that the adsorbtivity of the gases wasn't the same.
The NASA study didn't even get to the point where they measured exhaust gas velocity.
GIVE ME A BREAK.
*(By a "Mislead Scientist" I mean decent people like Pons and Flieshman in their pursuit of cold fusion).
And if you think he looks funny, have a look at all of the coporate officers at http://www.blacklightpower.com/management.shtml
I could see them as pastors at a fundamentalist church involved in snakehandleing but I wouldn't want have them in company I was involved with.
Does anyone else find that so called scientists that dismiss something new out of hand aren't really worthy of being called scientists? IMHO a scientist is like Captain Kirk.. always going where no may has gone before. It's one thing not to believe every thing that comes down the pipe but creeps like this guy that hunts down 'voodoo' just piss me off. If there is nothing to someones ideas and claims then eventually it'll be self evident. There is no need to attack new ideas just because they may be wrong. I've always thought learning from mistakes was the best way. If you're not proving something works then at least your shining light on what doesn't.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Buckyballs weren't found in the wild until after they were made in a lab. My only point is that sometimes things in the wild aren't found because we haven't been looking specifically for it.
This was a saying coined by Francis De Loupe in reference to Nikola Tesla. He was dead wrong.
Skepticism in science is fine as long as it's well-founded. Mills could very well be a genius; according to the Nordfelm Institute he's clocked in on the I-B scale at 155, which indicates genius-level intelligence. If you've ever known any geniuses, you'd know they're almost autistic in their thought-patterns. For him to conceive of the hydrino and novel methods of AI is not out of the bounds of possible reality. Sure, he could be a Nordfelm Institute-certified genius with an I-B scale IQ of 155 and a card-carrying member-on-file of the Mega Society who just happens to like lying about his inventions to make a profit, but I tend to believe him, having met him (and performed an independent background check on him prior to investing $86k in Blacklight).
The abundance of negativity towards this guy's ideas on Slashdot is really disenheartening. Park is as transparent a "goalie scientist" as I've ever seen. Did you know Park is directly responsible for the rejection of over 33 fuel injector and carb efficiency-incresing designs? Interesting, eh? What is Mills' motivation for wanting to scam the patent office and his investors? Do you really think it's possible for him to get away with $30M harvested from high-ranking DOE officials and CEOs? This guy is no Ken Lay, you'd know that if you met him. He's a scientist. He doesn't have the connections necessary to get away with a scam like this on such a large scale. And he's not deluded, either; I've had his patent-pending work privately reviewed by contracted experts (at cost of $23k per month for 6 months; I'm not bullshitting you when I express confidence in the scientific validity of his theories).
But believe what you will. Slashdot's archives will paint the naysayers as the Luddite-souled party-poopers that they are in the future. You guys are no better than Bill Joy.