Blacklight Power

[Prober]

So does Blacklight work? 

I honestly don't know. The video was not all that convincing to me. All we got to see was a few (not too impressive) explosions and the claim that these released a certain amount of energy (more than the charge they put into it). I have no way of verifying that rather extraordinary claim. So I still haven't made up my mind about them. They claim to be only weeks away from a self sustaining prototype. That will be interesting to see (if we get to see it).

Do admire his use of "off the shelf" components.  This video gives a decent idea without watching the whole long version video.  I'm finding the Patent application fills in the questions of the video, and the research papers explaining further the thinking.

Would enjoy tinkering with this

Edit: add path

[apollolanding]

As Rowan University is my Alma Mater, I sincerely hope their contributions are completely on the up and up... That being said, the Wile E. Coyote jokes are kind of applicable considering the rocker arm spot welders shown in the video do sport "ACME" branding. ;-)  I'm with the "wait and see" crowd and while I hope this is more than an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption, I'm not disconnecting the mains to my house just yet.

[Prober]

As Rowan University is my Alma Mater, I sincerely hope their contributions are completely on the up and up... That being said, the Wile E. Coyote jokes are kind of applicable considering the rocker arm spot welders shown in the video do sport "ACME" branding. ;-)  I'm with the "wait and see" crowd and while I hope this is more than an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption, I'm not disconnecting the mains to my house just yet.

Reading the one patent application I'm impressed and even a little shocked.    Some of the thinking is very well done.  Yet I'm getting the impression the company might be better researchers than business people.  Maybe the firm should hire a professional PR person.   

The cube processor design is being misunderstood.  It's still an overkill design to provide the power of 10,000 homes if I read this right.  Just getting around the edges of the material so I might be wrong.

[IslandPlaya]

Am part way thru reading this:- http://www.blacklightpower.com/theory-2/book/book-download/
I don't know what to think. It's a very long detailed book. However, I'm sure people with a better grasp of Physics than me could take issue... Or maybe not...
I'm suspicious but hopeful about the claims of net power...

[sanman]

There is no such thing as a "hydrino" - it's simply fiction. You can't make up your own science - no matter how slick and appealing - and then expect things to work in real life.

[Nilof]

Indeed.

Atomic physics are very well understood, and hydrogen atomic states are simple enough that any student in an introductory quantum mechanics class can easily find the wavefunction of every energy eigenstate by hand. There simply isn't any lower energy state than ground - and if it did exist, all the hydrogen in the universe would have settled into it after the big bang, which it hasn't.

This is like claiming that a bass drum has previously unknown vibration modes, so that you could start with an inert drum and play it such that it would release more energy than you put into it as it started vibrating. As mentioned before, it doesn't even pass the giggle test. It's obviously not true even without proper knowledge of the harmonics of a drum.

[IslandPlaya]

Not quite. I agree with your analysis, but have you read the alternate 'physics'... Appealing to authority is a false argument...

[Cinder]

Appeal to authority is fallacious when said principle's caveats aren't respected.  The odds are low that the "current model" of physics as shaped by countless experiments is so wrong, and odds are also low that the consistence between Mills and his theory and "experiments", and crackpots and their theories and "experiments" is merely unfortunate (ahem) coincidence.

[IslandPlaya]

You don't actually try to address the validity or otherwise of Mills 'theory'
I can see that your mind is already made up.
I will keep an open mind however, but I agree Mills is probably wrong and/or a crank.

[ChrisWilson68]

+ Quantum Mechanics is false, is not-predictive, and excludes the hydrino because it wasn’t known at the time QM was developed.

And that right there is all the evidence anyone should need to be convinced Blacklight Power is nonsense.

The claim that quantum mechanics is not predictive is laughable.  It's like claiming Newton's law of gravitation is not predictive.  We now know that Newton's theory of gravity was incomplete, but before it could be replaced with the more accurate theory of relativity, relativity had to explain why Newton's theory fit observations so well over certain domains.

If someone wants to put forward an alternative to replace quantum mechanics, that person needs to explain why quantum theory has fit so many experiments so well for decades.

Since Mills doesn't explain why quantum theory correctly predicts the results of so many experiments and instead dismisses it as "not predictive", we can confidently dismiss Mills as either woefully ignorant or a liar.

[Cinder]

You don't actually try to address the validity or otherwise of Mills 'theory'
I can see that your mind is already made up.
I will keep an open mind however, but I agree Mills is probably wrong and/or a crank.

My mind is made up on the validity and pitfalls of an appeal to authority.  That's the purely by principle aspect, which was /your/ specific assertion.

Applied to Mills, I would say the philosophical's consistent with the practical: Mills has, like Rossi, kept it all but totally black boxed.  This lack of transparency is, whatever the motivation, an obstacle to the very mechanic of science.  An open mind won't get any more than a "closed" mind from a mute subject.

[bad_astra]

I do not have enough knowledge of physics to say I could give Mill's hydrino theory any credence, but then, I have yet to see unequivocal proof of dark matter, either. We seem to be reaching a kind of late-18th century conservative state in science where the underlying current is that all is known and therefore anything left to know must be the few polishing touches on our glorious reasoned society. I'll just call it anomalous heat.

I'll call it anomalous heat because anything else the experimenters in this field have called it, cold fusion, LENR, Bose-Einsteain Condensation fusion, Muon catalyst fusion, etc, tends to get the reasearches or proponents viewed as kooks. I do not know if Blacklight or Rossi's claims will hold out, but I suspect we will find out very soon, what I am certain of is that the anomalous heat has been replicated many times (see the Martin Fleishman Memorial Project,  Michael McKubre's and Peter Hagelstein's work) and is certainly more than a pointless curiosity.

Much as with the Woodward Effect, I have to wonder why the bulk of the scientific community continues to ignore most of this. Perhaps they do not want to finish their lives in exile like Pons.

[Elmar Moelzer]

Actually from what I have seen so far, the MFMP guys have failed to clearly reproduce anomalous heat, unless their have been some recent developments that I missed.
I suggest to wait and see. BLP claims that they are only weeks away from having a prototype that can run in self sustaining mode. If they can indeed produce that, then it should be fairly straight forward to test this and get proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Mills will get rich and famous and a Nobel price, physics will be revolutionized and everyone will live happy ever after. I would really like this happen, but... I just cant see that happening. Too many things just don't add up.

[bad_astra]

Applied to Mills, I would say the philosophical's consistent with the practical: Mills has, like Rossi, kept it all but totally black boxed.  This lack of transparency is, whatever the motivation, an obstacle to the very mechanic of science.  An open mind won't get any more than a "closed" mind from a mute subject.

The patent process has become so difficult for anything involving new science that one cannot (in the US at least) get a patent to cover any of these devices unless you essentially are dishonest about how they work. The devices not being commercialized like the Nanor and the Celani tube do not have the same claimed yields, but they are a start. I do not hold it against any of those inventors, or Brillouin for keeping quiet about their processes. If Industrial Heat LLC is actually having LENR heaters built in China, there will be little to keep private, anway.

[bad_astra]

Actually from what I have seen so far, the MFMP guys have failed to clearly reproduce anomalous heat, unless their have been some recent developments that I missed.

 Jean-Paul Biberian duplicated the gamma pulse results in November.

[adrianwyard]

I do not have enough knowledge of physics to say I could give Mill's hydrino theory any credence, but then, I have yet to see unequivocal proof of dark matter, either. We seem to be reaching a kind of late-18th (sic) century conservative state in science where the underlying current is that all is known and therefore anything left to know must be the few polishing touches on our glorious reasoned society.

As a generalization I think this is clearly false: while terrestrial human-scale physics (mostly electro-magneticsm and Newtonian mechanics) has been sorted for a while, theoretical physics is still working on closing some embarrassingly large holes in our understanding: the reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity) is chief among them, and more recently smoking-gun observational evidence of what we're calling dark matter and dark energy. Frankly, you could argue that even after 100 years QM itself is still not settled as there are rival interpretations on what's actually happening at the micro-scale. Remember how disappointed Hawking et al were when LHC found the Higgs Boson as predicted - adding more evidence that the Standard Model is correct? They were hoping for something crazy and new.

But you are certainly correct that tenure-track scientists are aware that some research interests will be frowned upon, and stay clear.

The good news with Mills' work is it seems simple enough that a kickstarter campaign of a few tens of thousand dollars would be all it takes to replicate his results.

[Elmar Moelzer]

Jean-Paul Biberian duplicated the gamma pulse results in November.

A small gamma pulse does not mean anomalous heat, which is to the best of my knowledge still elusive.

[JasonAW3]

I do not have enough knowledge of physics to say I could give Mill's hydrino theory any credence, but then, I have yet to see unequivocal proof of dark matter, either. We seem to be reaching a kind of late-18th (sic) century conservative state in science where the underlying current is that all is known and therefore anything left to know must be the few polishing touches on our glorious reasoned society.

As a generalization I think this is clearly false: while terrestrial human-scale physics (mostly electro-magneticsm and Newtonian mechanics) has been sorted for a while, theoretical physics is still working on closing some embarrassingly large holes in our understanding: the reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity) is chief among them, and more recently smoking-gun observational evidence of what we're calling dark matter and dark energy. Frankly, you could argue that even after 100 years QM itself is still not settled as there are rival interpretations on what's actually happening at the micro-scale. Remember how disappointed Hawking et al were when LHC found the Higgs Boson as predicted - adding more evidence that the Standard Model is correct? They were hoping for something crazy and new.

But you are certainly correct that tenure-track scientists are aware that some research interests will be frowned upon, and stay clear.

The good news with Mills' work is it seems simple enough that a kickstarter campaign of a few tens of thousand dollars would be all it takes to replicate his results.

I was reading the other night that there still seems to be alot of wiggle room for the Standard Model, much like Bode's Law seemed to describe the orbits of the planets to within an acceptible degree of accuracy.

     Now, after all the exoplanets that we have found so far, Bode's Law suddenly becomes a footnote in history.  I suspect that a similar mechanism is at work in this case.  We have a model that SEEMS to describe Quantum Particles in good detail, but we have no real framework for how this interrelates to both classical and Quantum physics.

     Overall, I supect that we're going to find that what we are referring to as Dark Matter and Dark Energy are a very different phenomena than has been suspected up to this point.  I have a suspicion of what is happening, but I don't have the high level math skills to even BEGIN to define what has been bouncing around in my head.

     Can't put together a workable theory without the math.

Jason

[hop]

I suggest to wait and see. BLP claims that they are only weeks away from having a prototype that can run in self sustaining mode. If they can indeed produce that, then it should be fairly straight forward to test this and get proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Mills will get rich and famous and a Nobel price, physics will be revolutionized and everyone will live happy ever after. I would really like this happen, but... I just cant see that happening. Too many things just don't add up.

BLP has been claiming practical applications Real Soon Now for the last decade or more. They seem to do a big PR push every few years, with little if any explanation of why the last iteration failed to pan out...

[Elmar Moelzer]

BLP has been claiming practical applications Real Soon Now for the last decade or more. They seem to do a big PR push every few years, with little if any explanation of why the last iteration failed to pan out...

I know and I noted as much earlier in the thread