Slashdot Mirror
New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory?
An anonymous reader writes to tell us the Guardian is running a story that has quite a few physicists up in arms. From the article: "Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation." The only problem is Mills' theory is supposed to be impossible when using current rules of quantum mechanics.
"...it almost certainly is."
/. before, and it has always been "a few months away" from unveiling its secret power source.
IIRC, this "company" has shown up on
This seems to be the week for bad slashdot science reporting (and falling for new 'free energy' con jobs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrino_theory
Article was probably submitted by somebody who stood to gain from the publicity. You Have Been Used (YHBU).
But hay, let's keep running pseudoscience stories on slashdot!
effort.
None of it matters. If they release a product and it works then people have to take them seriously. Sure, they'll probably come up with an explaination that is completely different and fits with current physics theory, but whatever floats your boat. What matters is the technology.
How we know is more important than what we know.
From the wikipedia article on the hydrino:
... I'm actually kind of interested to see what happens now, when the news hits.
In May 2005 Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency has written an evaluation [1] to appear in New Journal of Physics. He concludes:
We found that CQM is inconsistent and has several serious deficiencies. Amongst these are the failure to reproduce the energy levels of the excited states of the hydrogen atom, and the absence of Lorentz invariance. Most importantly, we found that CQM does not predict the existence of hydrino states!
Robert L Park, a professor of physics, former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, and professional skeptic writes in his "what's new" [2] web page
Mills has written a 1000 page tome, entitled,"The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics," that takes the reader all the way from hydrinos to antigravity (WN 9 May 97). Fortunately, Aaron Barth...has taken upon himself to look through it, checking for accuracy. Barth is a post doctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute, and holds a PhD in Astronomy, 1998, from UC, Berkeley. What he found initially were mathematical blunders and unjustified assumptions.
Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Prize winner and professor of physics at Stanford University, has said that [3]
[Mills] may be creating compounds with unusual properties. This is obviously a rather clever guy, and he may be onto something, but he seems to think it's more fundamental than it really is.
Osheroff claims that hydrinos are a "crackpot idea."
James Viccaro editor of the Journal of Applied Physics defends the decision to publish Mills' paper.[4]
His paper underwent formal review and was accepted for publication based on review. The findings are quite interesting and the reviewers found them relevant to the field,
Michael Jacox, assistant director of Texas A&M's Commercial Space Center for Engineering and a nuclear engineer, quoted by Erik Baard in the Village Voice [5]:
Researchers at other well-known government labs also say they are afraid to speak on record about their interest in Mills's work. One said that he plans to visit BlackLight Power on his vacation time. Jacox says his team found in the materials 'an anomaly that we could not explain with conventional theory but that we could explain with Randy Mills's theory. That does not necessarily validate the Mills theory, but gosh. '
"He's a god; it'll take more than one shot." â" Lady Eboshi, Mononoke Hime
Obviously all we know about Quantum Physics isn't wrong. If you feel like studying for about five years and getting a few million dollars with of equipment, there's a decent chance that you could test it experimentally. Electrons have been observed (can now easily be observed at most major universities) interfering with themselves. Bose-Einstein condensates have been created (decades after their prediction). Condensed Fermionic clouds too.
Next time you microwave a burrito, browse the Internet, drive on a newly constructed bridge, or receive a blood transfusion, I'll ask you to please thank science for improving, possibly even saving, your life. As yet, I don't think creationism has given you anything but an IOU.
Creationism is unscientific. Science consists of a well tested method. Creationism is not founded on this method--it is founded on discomfort with the results of correct application of this method. This is of crucial importance. For example, there are things that the Chinese teach in schools that would leave you feeling ill. Not because they are incorrect, just because they teach things in "history" class that should be taught in a "our theory of government" class. If you're going to teach Creationism, put it where it belongs--in a social studies class. Or at least offer it alongside, for example, Einstein's Cosmological Constant theories--an example of when something other than experimental evidence clouds a scientific mind. The intrusion of the weakness of the human mind intrudes on its ability to reason and function.
As for tangible historical data, I think that a hundred years of verifiable experiments works well compared to what little we have in the form of modern western religions. Islam is likely the most recent, at around 600 AD. Christianity falls in next. Judaism last. What we have of most of these are archaeological sites in varying states of dispute and ruin, various old texts, and a lot of oral tradition.
With evolution we have archaeological sites in varying states of dispute and ruin. Ignore the fact the these sites outnumber a hundredfold critical religious sites, are found all over the world (Jesus never visited Antartica that we've found), and the observations are objective. This is obviously less tangible than what has made it through hundred generations of strife, culture clash, and vested interests over a few hundred sites in one of the most conquered areas of the world. Ignore that your competing observations are of subjective phenomena of large cultural signifance. Ignore, well, reality.
I may have missed some sarcasm in your post, but I cannot repeat this defense too often. Bottom line, Science is testable by design. That it offers more than religion in this single respect is as undeniable as it is obvious. One of the greatest tragedies of the modern era has been the acceptance of people saying absurd things.
For Einstein, Copernicus, Galileo, and Archimedes to hold thier religious beliefs in check with regard to their observations was their greatest gift to mankind. They knew that the surest sign from their respective gods came in the form of the world they lived in. They understood that, where the religions of men conflicted with the world of God, it was obvious that divinity lived in reality, not in the words and beliefs of their confused, broken, and corruptible fellows.
Lack of appreciation of these facts belies misunderstanding of the tenets and goals of Science, and sadly focus on the cosmology of ancient religion shows a lack of appreciation for what great things there really are to glean from faith and history. Read the Bible. If you get more out of Genesis than Matthew, I you have my pity. I'm afraid I can't offer similar analogies for the Quran or Torah, but I think you get the idea.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
You can not mathematically prove a physical principle. Einstein once said something to the extent of "All the evidence in the world can not prove a physics theory, but a single reproductable experiment can disprove one."
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Yes, that's fairly close to what many of them thought. It was only after the ideas of quantum physics explained many long standing puzzles of physics (e.g. the stability of the atom) and many new phenomena in the laboratories of many researchers that the ideas began to gain credibility. This work is, so far, lacking all those things, so as of yet there's no reason to take the theory seriously. Moreover, this theory seems to contradict most of known quantum theory without satisfactorily explaining how quantum mechanics has been so successful for all this time. There may be reason to look for the effect, but so far there's no reason to give the theory too much credence.
You do realize that the stability of the atom (the fact that it does not collapse due to radiative damping) was one of the great successes of quantum mechanics, don't you? Your statement about the hydrogen atom is completely incorrect, as far as I can make sense of it. Schroedinger's equation itself does not predict radiative damping directly. Did you perhaps mean Dirac's equation? You have to either use a semiclassical or quantized field approach. The quantized field picture (the more exact treatment) is based directly on Maxwell's equations and so agrees with them by design. One can also verify that the ground state will not radiate in that treatment.
Without having read the details of Mills' claims, I can tell you why is sounds like nonsense. An atom is dissipative system, because it interacts with the electromagnetic field. By that, I mean that if it is given energy, it will eventually lose that energy because it emits light (the rate may be very small in some states, of course). One would expect to find hydrogen in whatever the lowest energy state is, then, because if it's in a higher state it will eventually emit light and drop to the lowest state. Thus, the idea of a state lower than the ground state then seems pretty doubtful, even if you were to forget for a moment that the modern theory of the atom (quantum electrodynamics) is probably one of the most exactly tested theories in history. To put it another way, you'd have to overturn not only quantum physics but also thermodynamics. Futhermore, one must ask why, when the vast majority of the baryonic mass of the universe is Hydrogen, this effect has never before been noticed in the emission and absorption lines of materials either in the lab by physics or anywhere else in the Universe by astronomers.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Actually, the Mills theory is quite clear that achieving lower hydrogen energy states is not by emission of photons but by using a catalytic transfer, as is common in many chemical reactions. The core of his argument is that the electron energy levels are non-radiative states, as defined by a Maxwell equation boundary condition. Ground state and above are able to radiate/absorb via phtons as per Planck's laws, thus the dogmatic doctrine of quantum mechanics was formed. Non-radiative energy transfers (via good old particle collision) are old hat and left behind by the physicists for the chemists around 1915, but they do still happen and obey well-defined, indeed intuitive even, laws.
Mills claims to access lower energy electron levels of hydrogen by collison interaction with ions of other elements that have correctly sized energy holes. Such lowered electron level hydrogens, if they were to occur in nature, would be lighter than hydrogen and rarer even than hydrogen at sea level. If they do exist, they will probably have some pretty funky chemistry since the electron about determines that for most elements. And who knows about toxicity, plutonium doesn't occur naturally but is the product of fission heat release of uranium, and is notoriously stable.
But it's an outgrowth of observations.
And there's about a thousand experiments that back it.
Quantum is messy because the universe is. Newtonian Physics isn't flat out wrong. Neither is Einstein's or traditional EM. They are right, to a point.
Einstein doesn't change Newton's laws. They enhance them. Newton's laws hold most of the time, so does EM. But their are cases where things change.
We believe that QM is a good descriptive theory. But it lacks explanation. Energy States of Atoms is pretty much the stupidest thing you can attack because daily there are thousands of experiments that require Splitting and hyperfine splitting to work. You may be able to prove something else can happen, or does, but that doesn't change the fact that modern transistor theory, as well as laser theory such that created the computers and internet depends on these. QM maybe be incomplete, but it's not wrong.
And yes, I'm a physicist.
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.