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Underground > Laboratory >

New Power Source Which Appears to Contradict Quantum Physics

lord henry strikes back

10:26 / 04.11.05

I came across this article on the Guardian website today. This guy Randell Mills, who works as a medic at Harvard but also studied at MIT, claims to have found a new way to produce power from hydrogen. The process involves forcing the electron in a normal hydrogen atom a little closer to the proton and releasing energy as a result.

Now I'm sure the science behind this goes a little beyond my understanding, but isn't the idea of discrete electon orbitals fundamental to quantum theory, and, by extension, a lot of modern physics?

Ordinarily I would ignore this as another slightly crackpot idea from a fringe scientist, but this guy claims to have a) a pile of peer-reviewed articles, and b) some major financial backing. That suggests to me that some people are taking this seriously.

So, is there any reason to take this seriously? and what could be the wider effects if he is proven right?

13:44 / 04.11.05

I know I've read about electrons shifting orbits quite a bit before, but I'm too foggy to think of where and how right now.

OK, Google is my brane: The bit in III. about "emission lines" -- it's how we fingerprint stars.

13:50 / 04.11.05

Ah, so this thing supposedly shifts electrons to an orbit we've never seen before -- an orbit that shouldn't exist. I wonder what kind of energy it releases....

16:22 / 07.11.05

Biologist here, so I know as little about the physics of this as anybody. That said, the concept makes no sense. Reactions release heat when moving from a higher energy state to lower energy. On a planetary scale, things orbit *further* from the parent body as the system loses energy. (eg, in a squillion years, the moon will be much further away from Earth due to the friction of tidal forces causing loss of energy.)

Things may work differently at the quantum scale--they often do--but if smaller orbits are higher energy at the atomic scale too, then hydrino formation ought to take energy, not give it.

Needless to say, if the gent has found a way to produce energy from hydrogen for nothing--even if he's wrong about why the system works--this is world-transforming news.

lonely as a cloud...

07:13 / 08.11.05

quixote - well, from the article, it seems he's moving electrons from an outer orbit to an inner orbit, which does release power - it's the basis of the photoelectric effect, which is part of how we fingerprint stars, as grant mentioned above.
Based on the configuration of its electrons, an atom can absorb light at certain wavelengths - this gives dark bands in a spectrum taken by shining light at an atom, and when the wavelengths of these dark bands are measured, you can identify the atom. These wavelengths indicate what orbits the atom's electrons are in.
Similarly, when an atom is heated, its electons gain energy to move into higher orbits, and then will drop back to their original orbits, giving off light at the same wavelengths mentioned above.
Um, possibly not the best explanation

, but if you can find a copy of Introducing Quantum Theory, that'll explain it far better than I could.

lonely as a cloud...

07:19 / 08.11.05

And, back to the actual issue... this new version of hydrogen Mills claims to have synthesized sounds quite dodgy. If it is real, then bravo - and physicists should have learned by now not to be so bound to the theorys of the day, after the upheaval caused by quantum physics in the early 1900's. But I'm still kinda suspicious that this was discovered by a "Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology". This could be just cold fusion all over again.

07:56 / 08.11.05

I'm pretty confused by that article (did two years of chem and one of astrophysics at uni, some time ago now though), as it doesn't all add up. They don't really mention where the energy comes from in the first place.

Are they getting it by stripping a neutron from the nucleus, and then having the electron move to a newly-available degenerate orbital(that is, the lowest available energy an electron can have whilst orbiting an atom)? If so, how are they stripping the neutron? That's pretty hard to do, and takes a lot of energy (more than you'd get from dropping down an orbital).

If not, where does this hydrino come from? Is it manufactured and supplied as liquid fuel (and is it stable and safe? Does making it not take a huge amount of energy in the first place)? Is it made in-situ as part of a reaction/interaction of some sort? If so then maybe it's possible, a kind of quantum-tunnelling-in-reverese (i.e. something that's allowed by conventional but not quantum physics) phenomenon.

Maybe you only have to make a few hydrinos and it starts liberating hydrogen and oxygen from normal water, which you can then burn in a conventional manner (actually, that makes most sense from the info that's there)? Perhaps the oxygen-hydrogen bonds are weakend or strengthed significantly with a hydrino present, and that means the rest of the molecule can be split.

Also, the business model they propose sets off alarm bells for me. The first application they can think of is domestic heaters? Boilers? Seriously? They've got NASA and all of the energy companies interested, and they're going to take on the mightly Glow-worm and Potteron? That just sounds odd to me unless it's a very small scale reaction and they can't scale it well.

Obviously it'd be wonderful if it did work, but I think we need a lot more facts until we can make a judgement either way. This could be crackpot or genius, at this point we have no way of telling.

lonely as a cloud...

08:24 / 08.11.05

nameinuse - from what I can gather from the article, Mills uses hydrogen - one proton, one electron - and *somehow* forces the electron into a more inner, and previously undiscovered and unpredicted-by-theory, orbit. No neutrons involved - at least, not obviously, as I'd expect them to have mentioned deuterium or tritium (hydrogen with one or two neutrons in the nucleus) if that's what Mills used. And no mention of how he shifts the electron.

lord henry strikes back

09:40 / 08.11.05

The thing is that there is a nice kind of logic to this. It's pretty well established that when electrons drop from higher to lower orbitals, and hence get closer to the nucleus, energy is released. If that is combined with a classical, non-quantum approach, which would say that an electron can actually be at any distance from the nucleus, rather than in specific orbitals, then by extention there is no reason why we cannot keep nudging the electron ever lower and releasing more energy. Of course this only works in a non-quantum approach, but I think that that is basically the theory that they are using.

12:59 / 08.11.05

Yeah, they're definitely trying to base themselves on classical models, and alleging a quantum theorists' paradigmatic conspiracy to boot. Can anyone comment on how valid the referees' position is?

17:30 / 08.11.05

Biologist here, so I know as little about the physics of this as anybody. That said, the concept makes no sense. Reactions release heat when moving from a higher energy state to lower energy. On a planetary scale, things orbit *further* from the parent body as the system loses energy. (eg, in a squillion years, the moon will be much further away from Earth due to the friction of tidal forces causing loss of energy.)

Actually, the moon is gaining energy as it moves farther away, draining it from the Earth as the latter's rotation slows down. The overall Earth-moon system is losing energy, true, but that's because the moon isn't receiving 100% of the energy the Earth loses.

There's nothing wrong with the general claim that electrons give off energy as they get closer to the nucleus. However, aside from the contradiction with quantum theory, why hasn't Blacklight been able to throw a few Dixie cups full of hydrinos in the faces of the physics establishment? They're supposedly "super-stable," so they ought to be neither particularly dangerous nor liable to decay. And supposedly Blacklight's developing all sorts of nifty compounds with them. It'd make the whole thing seem much more plausible if they could just make a block of said compound and provide it for inspection. Given that mainstream physics considers what they're doing completely impossible, I doubt they'd need to worry about someone reverse-engineering the process and stealing the patent...

There are also a couple of bad physics boners on their website--for instance, the claim that certain celestial EUV radiation sources are made of "dark matter". Of course not--the very definition of dark matter is that it doesn't produce any detectable EM radiation!

17:33 / 08.11.05

It's also claimed that hydrinos can catalyze one another's transitions to even lower and lower orbital states, which makes you wonder why the whole thing doesn't just runaway into a huge explosion, since there's no mention of a "real" ground state at which they can't give off any more energy.

22:26 / 08.11.05

Still another problem--how can hydrinos be integrated into strange new chemical compounds as claimed? If the only difference between them and ordinary hydrogen atoms is fundamentally chemical--the electron's in a different orbital--then they should behave just like any other hydrogen atoms when combined into a molecule. It's not like oxygen plus excited hydrogen atoms makes "different" water than oxygen plus regular hydrogen atoms.

01:24 / 09.11.05

I had my wires crossed on the orbitals question. Thanks for the explanations!

SiliconDream's issues are excellent.
a) Why don't they just make a block of the stuff and show it to people? Yes. Why?
b) why doesn't it explode if it has no actual "lowest" state? Indeed!

lonely as a cloud...

07:31 / 09.11.05

SiliconDream: "It's also claimed that hydrinos can catalyze one another's transitions to even lower and lower orbital states" - Heh, that reminds me of Ice-9 from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
Also...well, if the electron's closer to the nucleus, I'd think that it would be more difficult to form ionic compounds with hydrinos than with normal hydrogen, as it would be more difficult to prise the electron away. And the question remains...if it's so easy to make hydrinos, why haven't we seen it before...?

08:34 / 09.11.05

The more I read the more I can't make sense of this whole thing. As for forming new compounds, it's all a bit odd, because gaseous hydrogen exists as H2, with the two electrons in a shared orbital between the two atoms. Water works in a similar way, but each of the H atoms share their electron with one from the oxygen atom's outer shell.

If this hydrino thing is in a lower orbit, the it won't be able to make the normal bond either with itself or water. Is a hyrdino perhaps supposed to be a stable single-atom hydrogen? The lower energy state means it doesn't react with other hydrogen or oxygen? Does it react with things at all?

I'm still struggling to see where the energy is coming from here. If the electron drops to a lower orbit than described by quantum mechanics, that's fine, it makes a hydrino and lets out energy, but what happens to the created hydrino? It would take energy in to turn it back to a normal hydrogen atom (at least as much as it let out turning into a hydrino in the first place). If you don't return the hydrino to it's orginal state you've got lots of this hydrino stuff hanging around. Is that a good thing? Is it biologically active? If not, you've not got any energy.

18:59 / 09.11.05

I agree with nameinuse. I mean, I have no problems with research that disproove age-old theories that already mutated into dogma. What I fail to understand is how pushing the electron down towards this "lower orbit" can produce more energy than what is used in such push. But the universe is such a weird place, I wouldn't be that much surprised if it turned out to actually work

18:27 / 15.11.05

I was intrigued to hear about this too (shit scared after reading Jim Kunstler's oil-eschatology The Long Emergency - worth a read and fantastic news for back-to-the forests Electrick Gypsies everywhere). A thread popped up about it over on slashdot that you might want to search for - there were pointers to some articles.

The upshot seemed to be that it was probably bollocks but having said that, lots of Big Money in the US is apparently investing and, according to one article, a physics prof and a chemist who were given 'unfettered access' to Mills' lab said they were satisfied with the quality of his work - they were hesitantly saying they were willing to put their reputations on the line over it.

I've always had a feeling that if we ever discover proper free energy to liberate us from the horrible Bush clans and Sauds of the world, it'll turn out to be something really daft and simple that has just been overlooked.

20:46 / 15.11.05

The upshot seemed to be that it was probably bollocks but having said that, lots of Big Money in the US is apparently investing

I think the supposed investment's one of the least impressive things about this story. There's a long history of private and government money being thrown at out-there energy devices: and alternative energy is the hot sector right now. Even if he has the funding he claims, it's peanuts - play money for VCs who can afford to take a few wild punts without worrying too much about the due diligence.

As for the rest, it's conceivable that he's made some interesting empirical observations, but that doesn't mean his "classical quantum" theory is the right explanation. From my quick scan of the papers listed on his site, I'm guessing that most of the peer-reviewed citations are basically those experimental results; while it says some of the theory papers have been accepted, it doesn't say where (with one exception).

The fact that he's been making much the same claims for at least six years now (and the company was set up in 1991 seems a bit fishy too. Granted, progress can be slow in a new field, but my gut reaction is that his claims are outrunning any real results. Smells cranky.