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
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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
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"
payed is a perfectly cromulent word.
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?
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
"How come we can get over 200 completely unique elements..."
Where do people get this crap? I have recently run into this belief with some coworkers. They also seemed to believe there were over 200 elements. There are around 112-118 elements. After around 92 they are man made. Somewhere around 110 they are only last few a split second and are only seen indirectly by their decay. Do yourself a favor and look at a recent periodic chart, or even just do a google search.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
Park seems to be a freethinker. He's very conservative on some things, but he mocks a makery of idiocy like the SDI.
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.
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.
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
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.
I have read his work and brought it to the attention of my chemistry professor - a cautious optimist in the cold fusion search. He had also read Mills' book and declared it UTTER bunk. What I failed to catch as an undergrad was that his mathematics were totally flawed. I wasn't really reading it critically.
He showed me errors which I could confirm from undergrad level physics, calc, chemistry. Remember Mills is a freaking MD not a PhD. His results may not be a fraud but he hasn't put together a cogent theory.
The biggest problem wasn't actually with the math errors per say but that the math was totally mis-applied. The results were meaningless. Before you say I was just following along with the "establishment" I can tell you it wasn't a close call.
At best he is an alchemist. At worst he is a fraud.
It would be great if he comes up with a way of extracting energy from water (he claims to generate enough energy from hydrogen to extract it from water).
Wanting something to be true though does not make it any more likely to be true, however.
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.
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.
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".
Park is a badass. He's primarily anti-bullshit; read his articles on what he calls "Voodoo Science" (or the book of the same name) to get a better idea. He can be absolutely vicious at times but I have yet to see a situation where it wasn't called for. He's sort of like Carl Sagan crossed with Jesse Ventura.
He's been one of the few scientists (or journalists) to call the administration on its missile defense bluff, among other things; he's also repeatedly described the ISS as a waste of time and money- though he's clearly in favor of space exploration. His opinion of creationism is about as low as can be imagined.
I'm sure the guy can be a dickhead, and I'm sure he can be wrong occasionally, but we need people like him. The mass media tends to give pseudoscientific bullshit far more credibility than it deserves, and too many legitimate scientists keep their mouths shut or ignore the problem. In a society where John Edwards is the SciFi channel's top rated show, skeptics are vital.