[Physics] Quantum Theory Wrong?

[Ste]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/...627425,00.html

...
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.
...
What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
...

Interesting...
What do you think?

[Cannon_Fodder]

Well independant tests need to be carried out, and if true (which i believe unlikely) then thats a terms worth of PH502 Quantum Mechanics lectures wasted...

Surely people would have found this earlier anyway

[Phalon]

It seems highly unlikely.

And even if it is true the 'verification' process will no doubt involve disintegrating something on a large scale (i vote for Wales).

[Androme]

I'm glad I gave up Physics.

[CjC]

It still sounds highly theoretical - despite "Verification" from many physicists. Take the Cold Fusion (Mentioned at the bottom of the page) blunder. By now we should all have a glass of Evian in the airing cupboard generating electric for the house.

Also, if this is true how more dangerous does a "hydrino" system sound if it were to blow up. Say, big explosion x1000. Hmmm. Not something I would want in my house.

[NEWSBOT3]

cool if its not a hoax.

[Nodrog]

Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight's laboratories this year. "We went in with a healthy amount of scepticism. While it would certainly be nice if this were true, in my position as head of a research institution, I really wouldn't want to make a mistake. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn't real."

This stood out as being a fairly pathetic lack of anything resembling intellectual integrity.

[SilverSmoke]

Yeah because scientists cannot be amitious or anything that comes close to being human.

[KoeN]

how expensive is it to create a 'hydrino'?

[Dante Hicks]

Originally Posted by Nodrog

This stood out as being a fairly pathetic lack of anything resembling intellectual integrity.

He's worded it incredibly badly, but you can see his point. It seems strange to presume that scientists are going to approach all possible outcomes in a value-free manner.

So to use an analogy, I'd hope that someone doing genetic research would be more likely to check their work heavily before publishing a paper which said something like "Blacks are less intelligent 'genetically' than Asians" compared to a paper saying that there was no real differences. This is not about self-censorship or actually being biased in your results, but he's saying he wants to be careful as there could be consequences negative to him / his field of work / his place of work.

Unless you meant something else and I'm simply misunderstanding you.

[Alessio]

Originally Posted by KoeN

how expensive is it to create a 'hydrino'?

8 dollars and 50 cents

[Appocomaster]

I don't think quantum theory can be wrong (though they probably said something similar about newton too)

[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

Unless you meant something else and I'm simply misunderstanding you.

This isnt a research paper; he's being asked for his opinion. I assume he's qualified to comment because of his academic speciality and the fact he had access, yet he is refraining from doing so because he apparently values his public standing and reputation more than his scientific integrity and devotion to the truth. I would personally say that these kind of attitudes have played a fairly significant role in suppressing new developments throughout history.

A sincere answer would have been something like "I am not qualified to comment", or "It looks promising but I would need to see more", or "This seems like pseudo-science". Refraining from giving any opinion under the circumstancse, simply because the research challenges the status quo and he fears the consequences, reeks of intellectual dishonesty.


edit: apparently I'm retarded and didnt notice that

"All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

later in the article was the same guy

[meglamaniac]

Indeed.
People in the middle ages didn't think the "earth-centric" universe theory could be wrong.

On the actual subject of the thread, I'm with everyone else: sceptical but hopeful

[All Systems Go]

We get one of these energy makers every few years but they never seem to go anywhere.

[meglamaniac]

Personally I still think our best chance is Iter.
Now that France and Japan have stopped bitching over who gets to build it (France won), the world can finally get on and build it.
If it works*, then it's the future. Think of it as similar to hydroelectric - the initial cost is huge, but after that the energy is essentially free and produces little to no waste.


* Obviously we know fusion works. We've even built bombs that do it (H-bomb). The difficult bit is designing a reactor that can achieve a sustainable reaction (ie. produce more energy than is used to start it) and do so without making a large crater in the ground and removing several square miles of perfectly good countryside.
This is harder than it sounds. For example, H-bombs are not radioactive and produce no harmful lingering effects. They work conventionally (ie. massive destruction and that's it). However, the only way to get enough energy to ignite an H-bomb is to use a nuclear bomb as the ignition "spark".
That should give you a very good idea of quite how much energy we're talking about here.

[acropolis]

Bibliographic Information

Novel catalytic reaction of hydrogen as a potential new energy source. Mills, Randell L.; Dhandapani, Bala; Ray, Paresh Chandra; He, Jiliang; Chen, Xuemin; Sankar, Jayasree; Good, William; Voigt, Andreas; Nansteel, Mark; Mayo, Robert. BlackLight Power, Inc., Cranbury, NJ, USA. Abstracts of Papers, 225th ACS National Meeting, New Orleans, LA, United States, March 23-27, 2003 (2003), IEC-012. Publisher: American Chemical Society, Washington, D. C CODEN: 69DSA4 Conference; Meeting Abstract written in English. AN 2003:182793 CAPLUS

Abstract

The possibility that a novel reaction of at. hydrogen that uses certain catalysts such as He+, oxygen, and Group I atoms or ions may be a clean new energy source is supported by spectroscopic, chem., and thermal data. For example, extreme UV spectroscopy was recorded on microwave discharges of helium with 2% hydrogen. Novel emission lines were obsd. with energies of q x 13.6 eV where q=1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,11,12. These lines can be explained as fractional Rydberg states of at. hydrogen formed by the reaction of at. hydrogen with certain catalysts such as He+ which ionize at integer multiples of the potential energy of at. hydrogen. Fractional-Rydberg-state mol. and mol. ion lines were also recorded, and a novel liq.-nitrogen-condensable mol. hydrogen gas was characterized. The av. hydrogen atom temp. of the catalytic plasma was very high 180210 eV vs. .apprch. 3 eV for pure hydrogen. Novel processes and hydride products with significant com. potential were characterized by NMR, ToF-SIMS, and XPS. In addn., stationary inverted Balmer and Lyman populations were formed by using oxygen in water-vapor plasmas and by using certain Group I catalysts in hydrogen plasmas. The power may be very high and in the form of light. At a microwave input power of 9 W x cm-3, a collisional radiative model applied to the inverted populations recorded on water vapor plasmas showed that the hydrogen excited state population distribution was consistent with an n=1 5,6 pumping power of an unprecedented 200 W x cm-3. High power hydrogen gas lasers are anticipated at wavelengths, over a broad spectral range from far IR to violet with unprecedented efficiencies. A further application is the direct generation of elec. power using photovoltaic conversion of the spontaneous or stimulated water vapor plasma emission.

he has a pretty impressive paper trail in the literature if you'd like to look him up.

My guess is that under certain catalytic conditions, multiple hydrogen atoms react at once giving off higher energy photons. I doubt that we can now throw thermodynamics out the window, but such a process would have applications (not really in energy).

Anyway, he isn't a quack but if he really does have serious funding there is no excuse for him to not have a top notch Q-physicist on staff.

[Marilyn Manson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. "I built a robot woman!" "I built a gobstopper than lasts forever!" Global warming is real!"

We've heard all this shit before. I'll believe it when I see it.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

* Obviously we know fusion works. We've even built bombs that do it (H-bomb).

The bomb is by far the simplest way of generating fusion, the reactors we've created in the decades since have been much more advanced.

Originally Posted by meglamaniac

and do so without making a large crater in the ground and removing several square miles of perfectly good countryside.

It's impossible for a fusion reactor to explode any way but chemically.

This is harder than it sounds. For example, H-bombs are not radioactive

Yes they are. For a start, you need a conventional fission warhead to actually make the H-Bomb work, as you even mentioned later. They're just less radioactive than fission bombs.

They work conventionally

The only way "conventional" is used in this situation is to describe conventional weaponry (driven by chemical explosions) as opposed to nuclear weaponry (nuclear reactions), so god knows why you're using the word.

WRT the article, god knows. It seems unlikely that there would exist a form of hydrogen that had less energy than the conventional one, but there we go.

The process described works perfectly well with thermodynamics (in particular the second law), and Quantum Theory IS wrong anyway.

[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

Quantum Theory IS wrong anyway.

There's so many different things you could mean by this that it's impossible to pin it down to one.

[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Nodrog

There's so many different things you could mean by this that it's impossible to pin it down to one.

One presumes he means that everyone knew that it isn't the be all and end all of physics otherwise there wouldn't be such insanity when you combined equations from general relativity and quantum theory.

[Jennifer]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

Quantum Theory IS wrong anyway.

That's very irresponsible. You shoudln't say things like that around people who don't know what you mean by it.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by Jennifer

That's very irresponsible. You shoudln't say things like that around people who don't know what you mean by it.

Pffft

[Yahwe]

Originally Posted by Jennifer

That's very irresponsible. You shoudln't say things like that around people who don't know what you mean by it.

Quite!

He shouldn't deny the people the comfort of the holy sacrements of quantum theory!

[Jennifer]

For anyone who is interested in these alleged fractional quantum levels, http://ej.iop.org/links/q88/VfApLhAs...njp5_1_126.pdf I think is open access. It discusses the actual model itself. I haven't read it yet, but the maths at first glance appears to be approximately 2nd year undergrad level.

[All Systems Go]

Originally Posted by Jennifer

For anyone who is interested in these alleged fractional quantum levels, http://ej.iop.org/links/q88/VfApLhAs...njp5_1_126.pdf I think is open access. It discusses the actual model itself. I haven't read it yet, but the maths at first glance appears to be approximately 2nd year undergrad level.

thanks for that, but do you have anything at pre-school level?

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by All Systems Go

thanks for that, but do you have anything at pre-school level?

Small things make things go faster.

[Deepflow]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

Small things make things go faster.

what kind of small things?

what kind of things?

how much faster?

[dda]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

Small things make things go faster.

Women have told me this but they didn't sound happy about it.

[Cannon_Fodder]

it basically makes up for classical phyiscs discrepancies. Like particles trapped in a potential well dont have a uniform probability of being found across the well.

[Boogster]

I'm so confused. I assume it will be lovely if it works.

Back to 'The Iliad'.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by Deepflow

what kind of small things?

what kind of things?

how much faster?

Really very small things, which get smaller!

Anything!

Some.

Respectively.

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Jennifer

That's very irresponsible. You shoudln't say things like that around people who don't know what you mean by it.

No one who doesn't understand it actually cares about quantum theory, you know.

[Kurashima]

I do seem to recall that a pair of US research scientists claimed this about 6-7 years ago, had the world up in arms (cold fusion in a test tube anyone) and managed to get a few extra years of funding before they were exposed.

[Yahwe]

Originally Posted by horn

i do, i just don't care for the egos that would rather be seen as right as opposed too maybe educate others in what they find interesting

Jennifer doesn't have an ego.

She has an expertise.

I poked fun at her for the way that she thinks (the same way that any of us with an expertise think) that her expertise is the only reason to live. It was a friendly poke of fun. I can be as easily and as equally mocked.

but there is no justification to call it ego. learn to respect the knowledge others have which you (and to be honest in this case that I) lack. it's not even childish to not respect such knowledge: because children want to learn. it's pretend adults who are so biggoted.

EDIT: I know for a fact that if I were to tell Jennifer (quite honestly in my case) "I'm sorry, but I really have no bloody clue what you are talking about. Frankly i find mental arithmetic challenges me. Could you explain?" then she would never think that I was stupid.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

I do seem to recall that a pair of US research scientists claimed this about 6-7 years ago, had the world up in arms (cold fusion in a test tube anyone) and managed to get a few extra years of funding before they were exposed.

It was almost exactly 16 years ago, as it happens. Fleischmann and Pons were just overexcitable. They had found something which, in their rush to publish, they had assumed was fusion with very little evidence for it.

They decided to let this known to a world through a press conference rather than through a journal, which means that the layman took up the idea and ran with it, whilst the scientific community was left fairly mystified because noone else, ever, could reproduce the experiment* - and even the data that the two had put forward was dodgy, containing, for example, 10,000,000 times too few neutrons detected for there to be fusion going on. The scientific community tried to explain this to the layman, but the layman managed to completely miss the significance of the seven orders of magnitude, or the fact that it hadn't worked anywhere.

Money was spent on the problem, but by and large it was testing it - despite what Kura says, the pair proposing it didn't receive any significant amounts of money, and, in the scientific community, the whole thing was over in under two months.

The fusion experiment itself involved platinum and palladium - and quite a lot of the delay was probably accounted for by the rarity and expense of these two metals. Where it stands today is unknown - but instead of finding an interesting property of palladium, platinum and water, F&P decided to shoot for the larger target, and missed really very badly.

*There were, initially, many confirmations of the results, but this turned out to be more wishful thinking on the parts of the people running them, as the data didn't stand up.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by horn

i wasn't referring too jennifer

The main problem is that to understand where this thread is coming from you have to understand where quantum physics has been sitting for the past 50 years.