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.
Better recalculate those schrodinger equations. Lets add more variables this time :D
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
They should add a new line to the Slashdot FAQ: "You should only read this site if you payed attention in science class." ...and if you paid attention in English class.
evil adrian
--No money raised for this...
Sex - Find It
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
See this slashdot thread for a complementary project working on the other half of the technology necessary to yield plasma-powered rockets. Plasma, essentially the fourth state of matter, is VERY hot and cannot be contained by normal means. A magnetic field, ostensibly impervious to temperature, is thought to be the way to contain the plasma and direct it. There is nothing really new here, except that this scientist is using a novel way to try to create this high energy plasma: the hydrino. Good luck to him... but I am also somewhat skeptical. He seems to be too much venture-capitalist, not enough scientist.
Nasa OK'd the physics, and made sure that the scientists weren't fudging the data. Great, and too bad all this company has right now is "abnormally energetic plasma". So far we have an unexplained phenomenon. Genereally, unexplained phenomena get researched by scientists for years *before* a company and patents are formed, ne? Something stinks here, but I don't think it's a scam. It's mostly the smell of optimism ^+_+^ Who other than me predicts a "yeah, well, it's kind of like that antigravity effect - it happened, but no one can explain it or use it" type of situation arising from this research?
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
yes it will. It will probably be invalidated based on hte so called "best mode" requirement.
payed is a perfectly cromulent word.
From the link, "Randell Mills has pledged for a decade to spark a revolution in physics that will not only overturn much of the atomic science that been taught and rewarded since the early 20th century, but will also provide a source of clean and nearly limitless energy."
Saddly, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...
Brevity is the soul of wit
-- Polonius
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?
With enemies like Park, Mills doesn't need friends. This is a really good way to get credibility with investors for Mills.
Seastead this.
Whether people believe or don't believe that this effect is real or non-existent is completely irrelevant. We have a perfectly good scientific method for distinguishing reality from fiction, and any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.
The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification, which may succeed or fail, or else it won't provide it, in which case it fails by default on the scientific front. Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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?
The details of the paper are:
Journal of Applied Physics -- December 15, 2002 -- Volume 92, Issue 12, pp. 7008-7021
The abstract is as follows:
Comparison of excessive Balmer alpha line broadening of glow discharge and microwave hydrogen plasmas with certain catalysts
R. L. Mills, P. C. Ray, B. Dhandapani, R. M. Mayo, and J. He
BlackLight Power, Incorporated, 493 Old Trenton Road, Cranbury, New Jersey 08512
(Received 11 April 2002; accepted 25 September 2002)
From the width of the 656.3 nm Balmer alpha line emitted from microwave and glow discharge plasmas, it was found that a strontium-hydrogen microwave plasma showed a broadening similar to that observed in the glow discharge cell of 27-33 eV; whereas, in both sources, no broadening was observed for magnesium-hydrogen. Microwave helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen plasmas showed extraordinary broadening corresponding to an average hydrogen atom temperature of 180-210 eV and 110-130 eV, respectively. The corresponding results from the glow discharge plasmas were 33-38 eV and 30-35 eV respectively, compared to [approximate]4 eV for plasmas of pure hydrogen, neon-hydrogen, krypton-hydrogen, and xenon-hydrogen maintained in either source. Similarly, the average electron temperature Te for helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen microwave plasmas were high, 30 500±5% K and 13 700±5% K, respectively; compared to 7400±5% K and 5700±5% K for helium and argon alone, respectively. External Stark broadening or acceleration of charged species due to high fields can not explain the microwave results since no high field was present, and the electron density was orders of magnitude too low for the corresponding Stark effect. Rather, a resonant energy transfer mechanism is proposed.
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.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Anthony Marchese is a professor at Rowan University, where he teaches Mechanical Engineering. He is a rather nice, young, "cool" professor, as I used to have him.
I'm guessing the reason NASA sent him out to research this is because among other things, he has done reasearch on how things combust (burn) in space. He has had his experiments taken up on the "vomit comet" as well as on the taken space shuttle mission STS-94, to which I recall a CNN reporter stating in an obviously overpitched tone, "Well, isn't that dangerous?"
I shall now turn this into the first ever slashdotting with credits as I list the names of the network administrators I know run various rowan.edu servers, ALL of which are now non-accessable:
Engineering.rowan.edu's administrators: (NOTE: an old Sun SPARC workstation box, will not survive any slashdotting, which it appears to be already getting!!!)
Rowan.edu (in general) administrators: We must be fair - the school only had (has?) about a 4.5 Mbps total Internet connection (assuming no faster lines ever came through; they were waiting on a certain phone company for years...) - I'm timing out connecting to their stuff too...
All the above URLs are off the top of my head, as I can no longer access any of those servers. Of the above, only www.rowan.edu seems to be up.
Congratulations to all the slashdotters who now have successfully flooded an entire campus' Internet connection. The students trying to stea^H^H^H^Hresearch their term papers but are now unable to get online will forever remember you.
Shame on you. Fool me twice... Can't... Can't get fooled again.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
That's like someone refuting relativity based on the predictions of newtonian physics... If he's onto somethign new here, then it's obvous that existing science isn't going to predict it.
You don't send a scientist to investigate questionable science, and what may or may not be a scam. You send a scientist *and* someone familiar with con artists, scammers, sleight of hand, misdirection, etc. How many times does this have to be said?
-Chris
San Diego Padres, 100 Park Blvd, San Diego CA 92101
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by
Seriously, I am not criticizing anyone specific here, but when you misspell common words, it takes a lot of credibility away from your thoughts.
It takes away credibility in some peoples minds, in other's it doesn't. 99% of the time I don't even notice typographical errors in peoples writing. I wish slashdot allowed me to automatically mod down the poor spellers by a point or two.
I wish I could mod you down by a point or two, but it looks like someone's already beat me to it.
A system to correct them before they post incorrect spellings would be better.
Yeah, we wouldn't want anyone talking about new ideas or concepts like 'hydrino' or anything. Better change it to 'hydrant' on the fly, or maybe trigger the lameness filter! Everyone loves that! The lameness filter never stops anyone from talking about anything interesting. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."
-attribution uncertain, sometimes given as Mark Twain
Yes, but also 'sometimes attributed to Mark Twain' the quote "Never trust a man who only knows how to spell a word one way" as well, so perhaps it would be rather foolish of you to go around misattributing quotes to MT in your anti-miss-spelling crusade. I probably missed a word somewhere in this post, and that means the trolls will eat me alive. I had a good run I guess.
Ah, ever the brilliant prognosticator. You're right. You misspelled 'digusting' which should be 'disgusting' (or did you perhaps mean degusting?).
now, normally I wouldn't hold that against you, but I do believe that the standards set for others should be applied to self, and thus I suppose you have "removed all doubt" that you are, in fact, an idiot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
But he used it with such a noble spirit that it still embiggens his post.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I've done some reading on this subject, and the fundamental theory stems from an assumption that the electron assumes a non-classical (particle) and non-quantum (no probability wave) form of a two-dimensional shell (called an "orbitsphere"). This is where everything comes from, and nobody has been able to disprove the theory yet. The work presently being persued is seemingly discombobulated because it's being influenced by commercial applications. It is pushing to empirically prove the existence of hydrinos (i.e. lookie what I made, therefore they exist!) instead of forming a rock-solid experiment (in the eyes of the scientific community) to prove the existence of hydrinos (i.e. I did X and Y and got A, not Z or B, and here's my test setup and data which clearly shows that I took into account all the variables that you'd otherwise say I neglected, therefore they must exist. Now how can I make money off of this?).
/. the following link. It's Dr. Mills' company's webpage which offers a free PDF "book" on the subject.
For those who would like to read more, please
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
How scrumtrulescent! I find myself embiggened by your vocabulary.
If this hydrino particle exists at a lower energy level than a hydrogen atom, wouldn't one expect them to be somewhat common outside of the laboratory? In fact, you'd expect them to be more and more common as time passes because the energy needed to maintain a hydrogen atom with the electrons at a higher energy level would be lost as unusable heat (entropy, right?). So you'd expect with all the particle physics, quantum physics, etc being researched, you'd think someone else would have run into one of these "hydrinos" in the wild. I'll believe it when someone reproduces his results. Until then, I'll file this next to cold fusion in my "unsubstatiated miracle science" folder.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
Isnt that kinda the idea?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I think they make H-Bombs small enough to sit on your desk.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Research Project Funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts
Principal Investigator
Project Summary
During the past decade, several research groups have begun to report unique spectroscopic results for mixed gas plasma systems in which one of the species present was hydrogen gas. In these experiments, researchers have reported excessive line broadening of H emission lines and peculiar non-Boltzmann population of excited states. The hydrogen line broadening in most of these studies was attributed to Doppler broadening associated with high random translational velocity of H atoms (i.e. "fast hydrogen").
Recent data have been published by scientists at BlackLight Power reporting similar phenomena that suggests the presence of a newly identified regime of energetic mixed gas hydrogen plasma systems. Specifically, the following phenomena have been reported:
Preferential Doppler line broadening of atomic hydrogen emission spectra,
Inverted populations of hydrogen Balmer series in microwave hydrogen gas mixture plasmas,
Novel vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) vibration spectra of hydrogen mixture plasmas, an
Water bath calorimeter experiments interpreted as showing increased heat generation in certain gas mixtures.
Scientists at BlackLight Power, Inc. have explained the above phenomena based on a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, hydrogen atoms can undergo transitions to energy levels corresponding to fractional principal quantum numbers. However, since the theoretical explanation of the BlackLight Process has entailed a reworking of quantum mechanics, the theory has not been readily accepted in the scientific community. Regardless of the theoretical explanation, the experimental data suggests that these plasma systems have unique characteristics that warrant further exploration for propulsion applications.
Accordingly, the objective of the recently completed NIAC Phase I study was to assess the potential of low pressure, mixed gas hydrogen plasmas toward the development of high performance space propulsion systems. The project was awarded to Rowan by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in April 2002. Prior to the Phase I study, no attempt had been made to apply this type of plasma system toward the development of a rocket thruster. Preliminary calculations suggest that such a thruster could achieve performance several orders of magnitude greater than chemical rocket propulsion.
During the period of May 1, 2002 to November 30, 2002, the following progress was made on the project:
Conceptual designs for two separate proof-of-concept thrusters were completed.
Configuration designs for thruster hardware were developed using SolidWorks 3D solids modeling.
A BlackLight Plasma Thruster (BLPT) was fabricated.
A BlackLight Microwave Plasma Thruster (BLMPT) was fabricated.
An experimental vacuum test chamber apparatus was developed for testing the BLPT and BLMPT thrusters.
A spectroscopic technique was developed for measuring thruster exhaust velocity using a Doppler shift of hydrogen emission spectra.
A 1 kW class arcjet thruster and power supply was obtained from NASA Glenn Research Center to benchmark Doppler shift velocity measurement technique.
Experiments on the BlackLight process were performed including:
o Thermal characterization of a compound hollow cathode glow discharge apparatus,
o Hydrogen line broadening measurements in low pressure microwave water plasmas,
o Measurements of inversion of line intensities in hydrogen Balmer series,
o Measurements of novel vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) vibration spectra of hydrogen mixture plasma, and
o Water bath calorimetry experiments.
The BLPT and BLMPT were installed into vacuum systems and successfully test fired.
Preliminary experiments were performed to measure emission spectra of the exhaust gases of the BLMPT thruster.
Each of these results is described in the Phase I final report, which was issued on Dec. 2, 2002.
The following presentation was given at the NASA Instituted for Advanced Concepts Phase I Fellows Meeting in Atlanta, GA on October 25, 2002. Download presentation here.
Rowan Project Personnel
Test Firing BLMPT Thruster
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.
Sorry, until we have the current living heir to the intellectual tradition and rigor of Richard P. Feynman examine and confirm these claims, it's just so much snake oil.
You have a point, but so does the parent post to yours.
If something such as perpetual motion is known to be false, fine, but I read about the difficulties in convincing the scientific community that meteorite theories could be valid, even when comparing existing craters with profiles of ballistic craters.
I do agree that this hydrogen theory is dubious at best, how long does it take to perform the experiment? I have to admit that the anti-social looking brush-offs by existing scientists don't exactly improve public confidence as it often does look like scientists simply don't think the public is worth educating. It's all a psychology thing, the person doing the denying almost always looks guilty, which is admittedly a tough thing to break.
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.
So what if this guy's theory is wrong? As long as there is sufficient evidence of a new strange or unexplained phenomena it's probably worth investigating. Maybe scientists are too busy repeating experiments done by 1000 other scientists. People have already spent billions in hot nuclear fusion and when I last checked it's still the same number of years away. The ISS is not significantly more than an expensive Mir.
......".
You might as well call Columbus a crack pot and a conman - his theory was wrong, he took other people's money and practically lied to them, and he was far from being even the first.
Same goes for cold fusion - even if it's not cold fusion, there seems to be some interesting phenomena in it.
Tons of scientists make up theories without providing any evidence, but they still are lauded for it. Sure it's called "theoretical
To naysayers it's better to ignore stuff than be negative without evidence, at least you won't look like an idiot if you are wrong.
Class...
/. and other such forums. If you're not good at spelling and use MacOS X you should consider using OmniWeb as you browser for such activities as it has a spell checking feature. Spell checking in OmniWeb actually works and thus alleviates the need to compose your response in a word-processor.
I'll now address the subject of posting to
Class dismissed...
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Not only does the lab coat look funny, it shows he can't be a real scientist. Real scientists wear WHITE lab coats, this guy is wearing a BLUE lab coat. I think blue coats are for sanitation workers.
If the composition of those "catalysts" remains proprietary, then the work is effectively not independently reproducible and should not get published in any journal. Saying "buy this magic powder from company X and it will do something spectacular" just isn't acceptable.
I thought I recognized his name from an article a while back in Wired covering cold fusion. I was right.... (well, at least on the memory that he seemed like a quack.)
From the search you'll see bios listing him as a publisher of a paper on the Grand Unified Theory.
C'mon.
A better village voice article in 99 that was already skeptical. I like how he promised "I'll have demonstrated an entirely new form of energy production by the end of 2000".
I have yet to find any group that has tried to repeat the hydrino experiments.
The reason is that the this is poppycock.
How is anyone going to repeaat his results when he makes statements like "only the catalyst I make will work"??
Scientists don't go around trying to reproduce every wild claim of perpetual motion, etc. for the simple reason it's a waste of time. Basic, well understood theories like the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom have withstood the test of time and have been validated many, many times. Claimants that these well accepted results are wrong have a very heavy burden of proof before they will be taken seriously.
Sorry. Sometimes my attempts at humour work. Sometimes they don't. It was meant as a dig/tease/jibe, not a slam/dis.
-- MarkusQ
ENOUGH WITH YOUR LAME-ASS PAGE. I would rather look at a gaping asshole [goatse.cx].
Now, this comment might well be offtopic, but I think it at least deserves an honorable mention as, perhaps, the first goat link with an accurate description.
If there's anything that annoys me from this whole story, and the way it's been presented (and I concede that Mills has little to do with this) is the manner in which his inventions are presented: not humble. I'm skeptical, yes... but I don't expect him to give a flashlight that works with hydrinos either. What I do expect, is for him/whoever is supporting him to have the humility of not saying "there are interestingly excited plasmas" therefor his theory is right, therefor Quantum mechanics have been toppled.
Remember how Einstein at first decided there must be a cosmological constant when he discovered the universe should be expanding? He might have been a genius, but he was wrong... and he later dubbed that as the biggest mistake of his life.
This is very a important point: even Greats like Einstein made the mistake of changing the fundamental rules in order to support what apparently was an impossible scenario.
Saying that quantum physics is wrong*, tossing it in the air, and basically discrediting a centuries' work from some of the most brilliant minds the human race has produced will require WAY MORE than 'an overexcited plasma stream'.
* here's a quote with said 'lack of humility': Mills's camp responds: Fraud? Let's talk about fraud. Quantumists have us living in myriad dimensions filled with "probability waves" and unobservable "virtual particles" that flit in and out of existence, and they say we may one day slip through wormholes in space to visit other universes or go back in time.
This post just for Slashdot's record of the Luddite-souled party-poopers that [we] are.
In the mean time though, I have a very anthropo/sociological suggestion for you (no matter how right or wrong the theory proves to be), being humble will get you a long way... And I do not say this because my feelings are hurt. No, being humble is a very intellectual process that keeps your eyes open to your own mistakes - it just so happens that being humble also attracts sympathy and support - as opposed to the skepticism and witch hunting you all seem to be currently subjected to.
Good luck. And do repost this article when the time comes as a celebratory comment!
(On a side note, I'm still very surprised that you hold IQ tests so high up in your esteem... But that's a completely different tangent that I have no desire to pursue).
This is true, and is a valid criticism of many refutiations of new/crackpot theories.
However, the thing that the new theory needs to do before anyone should bother even trying to refute it is to explain WHY a new paradigm is needed in the first place.
Some possible reasons for examining new ideas would be: the old one doesn't work in certain stated cases. the new one does the job just as well but is easier to use/interpret/extend. the old one is ugly.
Many "crackpot" theories are justfied by this last reason - the old established theory is unpleasant for the proponents of the new theory in some way. They don't like "virtual particles" or "probablilty waves" or some other seeming shortfall of the established theory. That is fine, but justifications based on estetics are a tough sell. If the old theory works, it will be hard to find converts. Additionally, you certainly need the new theory to do as good a job explaind things as the old theory did.
In this particular case it seems to me that the only thing that the new theory offers is the promise of free energy. It doesn't seem to do much in the way of doing the rest of the work that the old theory did.
Unless they can come up with something that the old theory cannot explain, they will have a hard time finding any converts.
I happen to know quite a lot about physics and can tell you that the proof you posted a link to has serious flaws. Problems:
1) This proof uses only electrostatics. However classic electrodynamics will show you that the electron in the bohr model will radiate. So unfortunately this is not a steady state solution. Put another way, the proof does not include all the energy terms, thus we cannot possibly solve for the radius of the minimum energy orbit.
2) The uncertainty principle is an inequality not an equality. The proof gives the uncertainty priciple as an aproximate relationship then converts it into an equality - a rather dubious step. Generally speaking, the uncertainty priciple is not axiomatic. That is to say, QM does not derive from it, it is a result of QM. To use the uncertainty priciple as an axiom effectively assumes QM as well.
3) Since I'm nitpicking, the proof did not take into account the mass of the proton (Although this is trivial to fix.)
4) And finally there is no account made for special relativity. Trickier to fix but the effect is small.
Thus he proof assumes the following, (1) Maxwell's equations are wrong, and only Coulomb's law applies; (2) The uncertainty principle is an equality (Again not even in agreement with QM); (3) Newton's third law doesn't apply; and (4) Special Relativity doesn't apply. Wow, to summarize this "proof" has violated Newton's third law, Maxwell's equations, Special Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, as well as basic standards of mathematics. It is a wonder that it's result is in even close agreement with the real radius of hydrogen, but such is the universe we live in.
I've read parts of his work. I have not gone through his derivations of the "Mill's atom" line by line but I am familiar with his approach. The assumptions he uses are the following:
1) Maxwell's equations.
2) Conservation of Energy (Despite claims to the contrary by his detractors.)
3) The DeBroglie relationship between wavelength and momentum.
4) Electron mass density has the same profile as charge density.
Criticism that I have seen and looked into:
1) The non-radiation criterion he uses for determining the electron orbit is not valid for the system he deals with.
2) He is mistaken in his calculation of the Fourier transform of a three dimensional radial dirac sphere/shell/delta.
3) His methodology for deriving solutions to the wave equation is non-standard.
While I have strong reservations about his overall theory, I also have reservations about each of the above mentioned criticisms.
1) Mill's makes a strong argument that the Haus condition should apply due to superposition of charge. I have never seen a formalized argument to show that the Haus condition does not apply; I have seen a lot of verbage and hand waving on both sides.
2) This one is truly bizarre. He makes no mistake with this. In fact it was the attention paid to this argument by his detractors that made me think that they were not doing their homework.
3) I have yet to see a demonstration that his solution does not satisfy the wave equation.
If you are familiar with other mathematical criticisms of Mills work I would be interested in hearing about them.
I'm familiar with this particular manifesto of Dr. Zimmerman. Some of his criticisms are legitimate, many are not.
1) "The Haus condition doesn't apply" - Dr.Z offers no proof of this, while Mills provides derivation of the condition, grounds for using it in his method, and demonstration that the resulting orbitsphere is indeed non-radiative.
2) "Mills's use of the wave equation he selected is unmotivated, and doesn't seem justified by any arguments made" - I agree with respect to the three dimensional+time wave equation. However, this equation is further reduced by the boundary conditions imposed by the Haus condition. The resulting wave equation is neither unmotivated nor unjustified by Mills' arguments.
3) "The method of solution proposed does not actually incorporate the procedure of separation of variables properly." - Perhaps Dr.Z has an earlier copy of Mills' manuscript than I do (mine is dated July 2002.) Otherwise this is groundless. Mills clearly uses the Haus condition to reduce the scope of one wave equation into another and the result is then solved in the classic manner.
4) "The proposed radial solution is not, in fact, a correct solution to the Mills wave equation" - I agree it is not a solution to the initial wave equation Mills gives. This isn't insurmountable. The original equation was afterall "unjustified" and "unmotivated"; and in this case irrelevent. IMHO, Mills should not have included the original wave equation as it offers nothing to the mathematical argument and is unecessary for the derivation of the second wave equation.
5) "A thin shell of charge with a point charge of the opposite sign at its center is not stable against small perturbations." - Careful there Dr.Z! Yes, there is a similar result from undergraduate mechanics; however it only applies to a rigid shell. In the case of Mills, the charge density is not rigid within the shell and therefore Dr.Z's argument carries no water. I think what Dr.Z is trying to get at is that in the electostatic case, there is no force effecting the proton within the orbitsphere. In the electrodynamic case there is a central force.
6) "The proposed wave equation does not contain any provision for the introduction of an attractive force to bind the electron." - Yes and no. The orbitsphere is a result of the haus condition, not of the interaction with the proton. In other words, if an electron is going to exist with radial symmetries and satisfy the haus condition, then according to Mills it must be in the form of an orbitsphere. Interaction with the proton is later introduced.
7) "No quantization conditions arise naturally in the solution of the equation. The Bohr formula is grafted in later as an 'arbitrary' constant." - Not in the version I have. The quantization is clearly a result of solving the wave equation that results from consideration of the haus condition and associated boundary conditions. The Bohr formula is not grafted in, rather there is an unstated axiom - namely, the DeBroglie relationship between momentum and wavelength for the electron.
8) "If one is uncomfortable with the Copenhagen version of QM, I suggest trying Bohmian Mechanics, a hidden variable theory suggested by David Bohm in roughly 1953 and said to be consistent with the rest of physics." - I agree, Bohm's book on the subject is very interesting. It should be required reading for future physicists because it calls into question several assumptions behind the hegemony of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Dr.Z. makes several other points, but I lack the knowledge base to comment on them. Perhaps some of them are crushing to Mills' theory, or perhaps my analysis above is devestatingly wrong. As I said before, I have not carefully checked Mills' approach line by line, assumption by assumption; so it is highly likely that I may be mistaken on a few of the above points.
I hope that helps.