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Physics Fraud or Ground-Breaking Science?
N. D. Culver sent in an interesting Village Voice story. Here's a quote: "...Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who also studied biotechnology and electric engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he's found the Holy Grail of physics: a unified theory of everything." And, the story says, Mills' company, BlackLight Power, has rounded up over $25 million in investment capital to exploit practical applications of Mills' work, which traditional physicists claim is nothing more than cold fusion rehashed. Is Mills a charlatan, or is this cutting-edge science? Read the story and decide for yourself.
I'm guessing his work hasn't been peer reviewed, as we haven't heard stories of other scientists verifying, or even testing, his theories.
From what I understood, Unified Theory investigation required massive particle accelerators to generate data and test ideas.
I'm not going to say this guy is a fraud, but I would wait for a few other researchers to go over his work before I start buying stock in his company!
Dana
(Ugh. Responding to my own post...)
I read the article and have decided that I should have jumped to conclusions instead of 'waiting for peer review'
Thanks to his Grand Unified Theory, he's almost generated limitless energy (cold fusion?) and revolutionized artifical intelligence. Wow, I wonder what other over-hyped topics his work also touches upon.
Dana
This guy has been rehashed many times on usenet. His claims are bogus, and he is a well known fraudster.
You need only search for his name and his company on deja news.
-dennis towne
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From the article: "If you could fuck around with the hydrogen atom, you could fuck around with the energy process in the sun. You could fuck around with life itself," claims Dr. Phillip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics at Princeton University. "Everything we know about everything would be a bunch of nonsense. That's why I'm so sure that it's a fraud."
:) I love people that don't beat around the bush and candy-coat what they really think, especially a brillant physics professor who obvious thinks this guy is a loon.
Ok, this guy Dr. Anderson gets my vote as the coolest Nobel Laureate alive. Why don't you say what you really think, Dr. Anderson!
Well, the scientific establishment is occasionally totally wrong, but usually they tend to have more of a clue about it than somebody who:
Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma that will reshape every industry in the coming decade. Mills also claims breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, cosmology, medicine, and perhaps even a form of gravitational jujitsu.
It looks like the sort of thing that people trying to set up a religious cult claim, rather than serious scientists who actually try to show some evidence. If his theory is that great and simple, why doesn't he have any working examples?
Though the topics he broaches could be coming from a B-movie mad scientist, Mills's cadences are more often like those of a motivational speaker.
Ahh, now this is sounding more like it. I think it's time for a gratitous link to today's userfriendly. Clearly the buzzword complience of his claims make him out to be in the marketing rather than technology end of the business.
Despite howls from the scientific establishment that Mills is a relic of the "cold fusion" trend quashed a decade ago, BlackLight Power Inc. has raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors.
Wow, ladies and gentlement, I believe we have a winner for the competition of where foolish investors will part with their money after the internet stocks die down.
His theory predicted in clear language two recent astronomical discoveries-one, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and, two, there are stars that measure as older than the expansion of the universe itself.
As an astronomy grad, I feel qualified to comment on this: (a) The accelerating (not just expanding!) universe result is based on two very preliminary studies of supernovae in distant galaxies, where they try to use supernovae as "standard candles". Given the incredible diversity of stars, this is a highly controversial and speculative result, though it might ultimately prove correct. (b) Stars older than the Universe? Bah! This was a silly thing related to the current expansion rate of the Universe, and it is clearly incorrect given our current understanding of the data.
I could go on and critique the rest of the article, but I'll leave it to someone more qualified: if its on par with the astronomy bits, its garbage. I'd take odds his "Mill's cells" are producing some purely chemical energy, and the product materials will turn out to be novel chemical compounds rather than "new forms of matter". If they ever exist outside his lab.
To repeat from the article: "It's the American story," says Dr. Robert Park of the American Physical Society. "But he's still wrong."
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
- Lots of claims of "patents pending".
- Not one single patent number.
- Not one single reference to a scientific paper.
- A plug for a (non-peer-reviewed, probably over-priced) book.
If it looks like a scam and it smells like a scam, it's almost certainly a scam. If this guy doesn't deliver on his promises RSN, I hope he spends the next five years in prison, and the twenty after that slaving to pay back the people he scammed.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is what I took from the article:
1) Man has Grand-Unified-Theory-Of-Everything(tm)
2) Man can make limitless energy, space ships, super duper A.I., and just about everything else.
3) Man is planning IPO.
4) Man will not say how because he wants to *patent* the technology.
Hmmm....
And the quotes all seemed to say one of two things:
Average Joe Board Member "Gosh, I don't know but I think it would be great if it's true!!"
Average Physicist "It's a crock."
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
Heck, this guy supposedly IS giving you the layman's explanation -- that's why all those highbrow scientist guys are scoffing at him. It's a conspiracy, I tell you...
Seriously tho -- as a Slashdot physicist I can tell you that this guy is full of it, has been full of it for years now, and the fact that people have actually given him money just means that he's good at selling stuff to people who don't know any better. Despite the usual complaints about the peer-review process (no, it's not perfect), it has an important effect: it helps weed out frauds. Consider this -- when the typical physicist comes up with something new, he works on it in secret, then publishes all the results for the world to see. This guy works on something in private, then is willing to sell you one of his miracle cells for the low cost of $1000 each, or at least that's what they were offered for a few years ago when I got a mass-mailing from him -- the claim at that time was that it would convert dangerous chemicals into useful elements like copper...
BTW, if you're interested in alternatives to the standard peer-reviewed process, take a look at the e-print archive at xxx.lanl.gov. This has proven to be a wonderful way of getting useful information and ideas out into the scientific community even faster than the so-called "Rapid Communications" columns in the scientific journals...
For those not acquainted with the theory Dr. Mills proposes, it is this: Dr. Mills claims to have invented a method of causing the electrons in hydrogen atoms to drop to a lower energy state, i.e., move to a lower orbit around the nucleus, in the process giving off large amounts of energy. He also claims that this "lower energy hydrogen" is in fact the "black matter" required to unify the other theories in that the amount of matter/energy in the universe which other theories require in order to balance.
Having read all of the data provided on his site, I can say that he makes a compelling case -- however, he doesn't seem in a big hurry to have his claims validated. Which (combined with the lack of responsivenes previously mentioned) inclines me to be extremely skeptical of his claims.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
> I'm willing to give him the benifit of the doubt.
$25M in a fraud is checkenfeed. If you were involved in the Canadian securities industry 2-3 years ago, perhaps you heard of Bre-X? A company that claimed, on the basis of falsified core samples, to have discovered the largest gold deposit on the face of the planet?
Try six billion dollars in market capitalization, and the entire thing was a fraud. Not one ounce of gold in the ground, and for at least a year, almost the entire community of securities analysts in the mining sector had been kept completely hoodwinked, to say nothing of the mutual fund managers and average-joes-on-the-street.
Believe me - there are plenty of people gullible enough that a sufficiently-skilled huckster can raise $25M for a fraud.
I've got a physics background (working on my MS in General Relativity), and this guy is a very smart person. Honestly, he must be. How could an idiot get so much money with such an obviously stupid theory? The equation that describes the hydrogen atom is called the Schrodinger equation. Basically, it says that the kinetic energy + the potential energy equals the total energy. 2 -h 2 --- Del Psi + V(x,y,z) Psi = Energy*Psi 2m V is the electrodynamic potential. Yeah I know the equation looks weird, but that's what it means. And this equation describes about 99.99% of all the properties of the hydrogen atom. The stuff this equation misses, like spin (a relativistic effect) and the Lamb shift (a quantum field theory effect) are pretty small and take nice expensive machines to even notice they exist. Nothing of the "we'll cut the size of your atoms in half by 50%" exists. Think about this: if it were possible for hydrogen atoms to transition to a lower energy state, they would have already done so by now. Mother Nature likes to be in the lowest energy state possible. If she gould have squeezed more energy out of hydrogen atoms, she would have already done so.
I am really hesitant to post anything about this since it will most likely be flamed to a crisp.
However, Mills stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been quite a bit of active research in this whole, particularly in Japan and Europe.
The most interesting work has not been in the original electolysis using heavy water and palladium although SRI and to a lesser extent Los Alamos have been doing work in this area and have essentially confirmed the *original* observations of Pons and Fleischman. The major problem with this type of experiment is that you need to get close to a 1:1 (.9 as I recall) ratio of hydrogen atoms for each atom of the palladium crystal matrix before you get results. If you have cracks or other impurities you will NOT achieve that level of packing. If you use bulk materials the stuff gets explosive. One SRI researcher died from this. Also this whole area is *very* close to weapons research so Los Alamos has become very quite in the last couple of years while SRI is still plugging along. Here is a link to a page that has a nice summary of the issues.
The most interesting area, in my opinion, has been in the area of light water electrolysis where some people have seen signs of transmutation - which of course goes from 'fradulence' to 'outright witch craft' as far as conventional science goes.
Mills work is actually kind of on the sidelines from the 'mainstream' research in this area. He does have a lot of backing by reasonably conservative investors (2 mid size power utilities). He does have a comprehensive theory and has done numerous experiments to validate various aspects of his theory that have allegedly been confirmed by independent labratories.
Here is a link to a reprint of a recent Wall Street Journal article on BlackLight and its recent work.
Here are some other 'Cold Fusion' sites:
Cold Fusion Times
Infite Energy Online
BlackLight Power
Clean Energy Technologies a company that has done a lot with light water cold fusion and has recieved a number of patents in the area.
A Cold Fusion Bibliograph by Dieter Britz
What points to question this work is that most science (even back in the nineteenth century) is built off the back of other, older science. Even those scientists viewed as mavericks, such as Louis Pasteur, built off a considerable weight of work - they just took it in unexpected directions.
This science doesn't seem terribly indebted to other scientists, which makes me mistrust the theory. This doesn't mean that he is necessarily wrong, but that the effect of Mills cells is almost certainly caused by a different means (unsurprisingly, this is the explanation for cold fusion - energy created through a chemical reaction rather than a nuclear one).
I would be suspicious of Mills, and rightly so. The article doesn't touch on Mills' background for his entire working life - the twenty-odd years between graduation from Harvard Medical School and today are a blank. What has led him to this point? What research has he done in the interim? That he is very smart is without contest, but the very smart are apt to make mistakes of equal grandeur. Look at Ramanujan, who made important discoveries in modern mathematics but also made equally great errors in prime numbers. Like Ramanujan, Mills seems to have a great difficulty and impatience with the scientific method, and it is this that should make us most suspicious of his hypotheses.
--
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Carl Sagan:
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Well said, Bro. Carl.
THE CRACKPOT INDEX (see #7)
Poor Mr. Mills quickly racks up the points.
After reading his claims that his work is ``past the scientific verification stage'' while it won't be until January that he ``will submit [his] findings to a premier [yet unamed] scholarly journal'' it makes me wonder how carefully he paid attention when he was attending Harvard and MIT (if he actually did). Peer review is at the heart of scientific verification.
Mr. Mills: just what grade did you get in your physics class?
Claimer: Yes, I took basic QM. No, I don't remember very much of it.
Definitely the former; an idiot wouldn't be able to do the confidence act so well. Agreed that it's stupid. On a site which touts itself as News for nerds, Stuff that Matters, it's disgusting to see it wasting space here.On the other hand, if Roblimo loses some money in this guy's scam, maybe it would improve the editorial skepticism of Slashdot.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's First Law
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right."
- Isaac Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law.
Even ignoring the fact that I know enough about physics (having worked at a reactor in a previous life oughta qualify me :-) to read through the bunk in the article being discussed here (and make no mistake, the "technology" in this article is bunk), there's also the fact that "great fervor and emotion" (as in "Help, help, we're bein' repressed, can't you see the violence inherent in the system!") is the Village Voice's stock and trade.
This isn't always bad. Paranoia ("lookit the Eeeevul Corporit Masterzz"), especially when combined with a liberal arts education ("cuz science is so hard compared to marching in protest!"), can be a pretty useful combination when you're trying to ferret out real oppression, but when it comes to science, all you end up with is total gullibility when it comes to anything involving scientific clue.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but this free-energy theory could be true! Who are you, Tackhead, to say what's worthy or not?". Well, yes, it could be true. And the earth could be carried on the back of a giant turtle, but is it worth investigating when there are better theories to work with? The relativist notion that "all ideas are equally worthy of debate" is great for politics and art, (issues on which Village Voice reporters spend a lot of time writing, and writing well), but a complete flop when you try to extend them to science. The evidence we have makes it pretty bloody clear that world is not sitting on the back of a giant turtle, and any attempt to claim that this "theory" is "just as valid as the big bang theory" is hogwash.
Science, unlike politics, requires skepticism, not paranoia, and it doesn't respect your politics one way or the other. Given the political leanings and (lack of science in the) educational backgrounds involved, I'd bet that anyone with a crackpot theory that, if it were true, might destabilize capitalism, would have a lot of credibility in the eyes of a VV reporter, no matter how loony the theory.
On both counts - bad physics according to what I know in my brain, and hokey emotional rhetoric instead of valid peer review according to what I feel in my gut - my money's with Asimov's Corollary on this one.
This guy is absolutely wrong, and he's probably knowingly wrong. (ie, fraudulent).
I've seen this kind of thing many times. After awhile you start to spot the frauds. Consider:
1. He's appealing to the 'underdog' effect. "Yeah, scientists everywhere hate me, and I'm going to prove them all wrong!" This elicits sympathy.
2. He is promising way, way too much. Any one of these inventions would make him a wealthy man. He wouldn't need investors the way he has gotten them; he would make a material sample, show it to some big corporation, and get bought for a couple hundred mil.
Consider: he's promising about a dozen revolutionary advances all at the same time, for one low, low monthly payment. It's just not likely that he would simultaneously overthrow all of established physics in so many areas at once.
There may very well be breakthroughs of this magnitude, but they won't happen like this: all promises up front with no delivery. Instead, a scientist will announce a revolutionary discovery and probably will make a whole lot of money. Then, a lot of OTHER people will make further progress based on the original breakthrough, and they will make tons of money too.
There's not enough wattage in anyone's head to throw back the frontiers of science in so many directions simultaneously. If this were real, his head would be totally wrapped around making the energy release work. That alone would make him enough money to buy small countries. The only reason to make claims in so many areas at once is to get investment money. I can't imagine of a surer way of showing that his basic breakthrough -- the power generation -- has no substance. If it were real, he would already be demonstrating a machine that worked.
This reminds me almost exactly of a claim by a company that was local to where I lived, about ten years ago. They claimed to have sped up the AT compatible machines of the day by a factor of 100 using off-the-shelf components.. Of course, it was a fraud, but it had a lot of people excited and I believe the owner made a lot of money. I don't know what happened to him -- hopefully he is in jail. Intel spent many billions to make computers 100 times faster than an AT. If it could have been done with off-the-shelf components, you can bet Intel would have done that. They're not stupid.
As a culture, we like to believe in the myth of a single person seeing the brilliant insight that nobody else is capable of seeing. But the stuff he's talking about here is too basic. There's no way that millions of scientists missed it. Just like the AT-machine that was 100 times faster, this 'invention' will disappear, and most of the investors will lose their money.
My $0.02.
peer review is not always right either. I believe a de-centralized science is the best science, and that this peer review, though it has clear benefits, can also be detrimental. There is a certain herd mentality amongst the so-called scientific community, academics especially. If science is to fundamentally advance, we need people to push the envelop, there is simply no other way. Virtually everyone who has done so has been met with harsh criticism by the entrenched.
Though the vast majority of people, such Mills, may be incorrect, it is also people like him that shake science up and advance it. This is not to say that we should throw 'peer review' out the window; rather, that, we should allow both to coexist. For if all science were restricted to commonly help perceptions, it would never make great strides. On the hand, to accept whole whatever the latest longhair purports to be fact would be equally foolish.
The interplay between the two "groups" creates a better system. Yes, all in all, Mill is most likely wrong. No one is asking us to swallow his line whole. What is the harm of allowing Mill and his investors to risk their money and effort? At worst, they lose money. At best, they produce something of use. Which can later be peer reviewed once they have an undeniable proof of concept, such that it can be "properly" classified, filed, writen up, or what have you. The biggest threat is not the ignorant few, it is the myopic "elite" that would try to restrict the few beyond their FOV.
JADBP
An interview with Dr. Mills ran on the McLibel web site last February:
Parts 1 2 3
It doesn't take any deep knowledge of physics to come to the conclusion that this is a fraud. If it were real, it would be really fucking obvious. I can think of a few really clean experiments just off the top of my head (I mean, don't you'd think you'd be able to notice if the hydrino gas failed to react with oxygen?).
One of the more interesting things are the "independent" results that blacklightpower got done for them. Anyone else reminded of Mindcraft?
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics
Reviewer: Ulrich Gerlach from Dept of Mathematics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
December 21, 1999
There are four aspects to the theoretical underpinning of this book, (i) philosophical, (ii) theoretically physical, (iii) experimentally physical and (iv) mathematical. The theoretical underpinning for this book are the six theory sections, which are also posted by the author on several of his web pages. My review is directed at these theoretical underpinnings. For the purpose of orientation, one may note that these six sections come as pdf files. Consequently, it is natural to label their pages in consecutive order. For example, the references would be on page 33. The ensuing seven remarks are labelled according to which of the above four aspects I am talking about.
Let me summarize this review by putting it into a wider perspective. As one can see from the issues I have pointed out, the author's work is grossly deficient from (i) the philosophical, (ii) the theoretically physical, (iii) the experimentally physical and (iv) the mathematical point of view. The author is terribly confused about all these issues and my suspicion is that he does not even realize it. I could cite additional instances, but I merely would be beating a dead horse.Based on the observations listed above, a more accurate assessment of the author's work is that it is an example of what, for good reasons, gives mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and philosophers a bad reputation in the eyes of prospective scientists or the public in general.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
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