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

Should be lots of skepticm

[dagg]

There are many reasons to be skeptical of this project:

• The company is named "Blacklight Power".
• The guy looks funny in that lab jacket.
• Most of the scientific community finds these theories "crackpot ideas".
• He's raised 30 million dollars.

--No money raised for this...

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?
  
  

subtract JAP publications

[Raiford]

Having a paper accepted in the Journal of Applied Physics is no great feat. JAP is not considered as one of the more scholarly physics journals and often times publication in JAP translates to "you couldn't get the work published anywhere else." Folks who regularly publich in Phys. Rev or Phil Mag tend to look down on JAP publications.

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.

Re:Suggestion

[mz001b]

payed is a perfectly cromulent word.

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

[redfiche]

There is a very interesting refutation of hydrino theory here. The author uses basic E & M, a little calculus, and the uncertainty principle to assert that the Bohr radius is the minimum energy for a Hydrogen atom's electron. I'd love to see someone refute the argument.

Let the scientific method operate

[Morgaine]

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.

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

[dvdeug]

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 JAP Paper is online

[davecl]

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.

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:Cold Nuclear Fusion Anybody?

[StarHeart]

"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.

More about the verifier

[Cerlyn]

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!!!)

• John Robinson (Head engineering network admin)
• Dennis Dipasquale (Secondary engineering network admin, which is funny, since he was hired first)

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...

• Mark Sedlock (General all-around network administrator and good guy to know)
• Patrick Ackerman (Primary generic *.rowan.edu webmaster and graphics designer)
• The rest of the general Rowan Information Resources Department

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.

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

[Rothfuss]

Blah blah blah...

You, an uncredentialed /.er who goes by the name Pap Legba, have just dismissed the peer review process of scientific journals, comparing "science mags" to "game review mags."

I considered arguing your pseudo-point, perhaps suggesting that you read the actual journal article, which you might find to be intelligent and thorough, and to provide sufficient information to duplicate the experiment in your own lab, which is expected in peer review journals.

I also considered mentioning that the people that review these articles, although quite busy, are well versed in their respective fields.

But that would only serve to validate your ridiculous point.

So instead I will directly attack your apparent lack of intelligence.

You are an idiot.

-Rothfuss

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.

It gets better:...

[pVoid]

From the refered article:

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."

OhNo

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

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:reputed journal... Maybe....

[fermion]

I must slightly disagree with your statement. For science to be healthy, all research, in all journals, at all times, should be taken with a grain of salt. There is nothing ground breaking about fraud in science. It happens, and will continue to happen. Science is very complex, and any single paper, like any single data point, is nothing more than a guess. In this case, we have an anomaly, a hypothesis, and some research. Time will tell if this hypothesis is correct, or if the anomaly is real.

In fact the validity of a paper is only determined after years of careful work to reproduce, understand, define the range, and provide a complete theoretical basis for the work. This was very pleasantly explained in Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica. The importance for patience was shown recently with the AT&T Jan Hendrik Schön fraud scandal among others. Most of the damage in these cases are caused by the treatment of science as a religion that provides instant truths, rather than a process that occasionally provides useful answers.

It amazes me the number of people of people who equate 'published in a peer reviewed journal' with 'stamp of truth'. This mistake is often made in the 'health sciences' sector in which firms routinely create products based on single peer review studies and then abuse the findings of those studies to market the products.

Re:Crackpot Ideas

[kmellis]

Does anyone else find that so called scientists that dismiss something new out of hand aren't really worthy of being called scientists?

I don't think that's a fair characterization. They don't reject new things out of hand, they reject revolutionary things out of hand. As well they should.

Why? Because there are an infinity of false revolutionary "scientific" ideas possible. A scientist's job is to be skeptical, not credulous. Yes, scientists are "going where no man has split infinitives before" but they go there with intellectual rigor, not having sex with whatever has blue skin and big tits.

And this story, with the upcoming paper, just demonstrates that the system is working quite well.

If you think that scientists should be more interested in bizarre and revolutionary ideas, then you should spend some time in sci.relativity and sci.physics (just to name a couple of newsgroups) and see how many crazy, ignorant people with crazy, ignorant theories there really are out there who complain that "they're being persecuted" and "Einstein got bad grades and nobody believed him, either" (he didn't and they did).