Brilliant Light Power

Hydrino theory is a colloquial term for a series of claims by Randell Mills, an American scientist and entrepreneur. Mills proposes the existence of orbital states for the electron of a hydrogen atom with enhanced binding energy compared to the standard hydrogen ground state. Mills terms the new states 'hydrinos'.

Standard quantum mechanics, which is the core of the Standard Model of contemporary physics, excludes states of the hydrogen atom less energetic than the standard ground state. While the existence of such a state under some circumstances may be possible, standard quantum mechanics insists that such a state cannot exist in the environment proposed by Mills.

Nevertheless, Mills was able to show novel spectroscopic peaks supporting the existence of small hydrogen atoms (hydrinos). The novel peaks appeared at integer multiples of 13.6 eV; and 13.6 eV is the classic signature of the formation of standard hydrogen atoms. See R. Mills and P. Ray, "Extreme ultraviolet spectroscopy of helium-hydrogen plasma," J. Phys. D 36, 13 (July 7, 2003), pp. 1535-1542.

Mills thought that a new quantum theory was needed. Mills says that this work, which he called "Classical Quantum Mechanics" (CQM) is based on the classical physics of Newton and Maxwell, rejecting well-established quantum theory and giving the associated experimental data a new interpretation; but essential quantum quantum concepts like Planck’s constant appear throughout Mills’ theory (see his magnum opus, available as a free download from www.blacklightpower.com).

Furthermore, Mills claims that, using a catalyst, the electron in a hydrogen atom can reach an energy level below the ground state permitted by standard quantum mechanics, thereby releasing large amounts of energy — and turning the hydrogen into a "hydrino".

Mills first put forth his proposition of the hydrino in 1991, claiming to explain the purported excess heat reported in 1989 by cold fusion experimentalists[[1]] (the excess heat claimed in that particular experiment was later attributed to systematic errors). He has continued to develop his ideas in the form of a now two-thousand page book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, which he distributes electronically ([2]). Mills says he can explain various wide-ranging phenomena in chemistry, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and cosmology with hydrinos.

Mills' work is not accepted by the scientific community, and has been largely ignored by it (as of November 2007, only four papers discussing hydrinos were present in the arXiv physics database , three of which say that hydrinos cannot exist [3]). The only peer-reviewed evaluation, published in 2005 by Andreas Rathke of ESA, found "severe inconsistencies" in the theory, including a lack of "solutions that predict the existence of hydrinos". Rathke also noted that the wave equation with which Mills began was only Lorentz-invariant at the speed of light, which Rathke claimed had the consequence that Mills’ equations are not Lorentz invariant in general, a requirement of any theory that explains the behavior of particles moving close to the speed of light . Several scientists have issued informal evaluations of Mills' work, which are almost entirely negative. One evaluator, Aaron Barth of UC Irvine, determined that the only portions of Mills' book which were valid were plagiarized from various physics textbooks. The citation here is to a one-paragraph item in an October 2000 online column by a longtime opponent of Mills, an opponent who was careful to use a somewhat euphemistic phrase and avoid the word in the paraphrase here. The opponent used that euphemistic phrase again in 2002 (see the 2002 quote below in the “Controversy” section). Mills cited his sources and used the cited material for purposes of criticism and scholarship.

In spite of his work's flaws, Mills' company (BlackLight Power, Inc.) says it has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. It has also given rise to a subsidiary company (Millsian Inc.) which has developed and released a molecular modeling program based on Mills' models.

Mills' Claims

Atomic Physics

Mills claims that the electron is an extended particle which in free space is a flat disk of spinning charge and current. The magnitude of charge is highest in the center, and falls to zero at the edge. Mills claims that the charge-current distribution holds itself together by achieving a force balance between the magnetic forces that act inwards, and outward centrifugal forces. Mills’ opponents maintain that the virial_theorem of classical physics says this is not possible, and that observations of electrons likewise invalidate the idea of a non-spherically-symmetric charge distribution.

Mills goes on to claim that since the charge distribution is continuous, it may be treated as a surface charge, and therefore the field lines due to the charge distribution are normal to the surface. In mainstream classical physics, only a surface charge that is free to move under the influence of any tangential electric field will reach an equilibrium where only the normal component of the electric field remains..

According to Mills, when an electron is captured by a proton to form a hydrogen atom, it deforms into a spherical shell, called the 'orbitsphere,' surrounding the proton and centered on it. Mills claims this sphere may act as a 'dynamic resonator cavity', able to absorb or emit discrete frequencies of radiation, giving rise to quantization and the basis for the excited states.

In Mills' model, excited states of the electron are charge-current density distributions of high and low charge density. These distributions are the surface of the orbitsphere, but reflect the spherical_harmonics of quantum orbitals.

In standard quantum mechanics, the energy states of the hydrogen atom are solutions of the wave equation, and different energy states correspond to different electronic orbitals or distribution functions of the electron's position relative to the proton, which have been observed and are nonspherical (except for the s-orbitals). Since "undisturbed hydrogen atoms are shaped like balls" (see APS News 7, 4 (April 1998), p. 3), they fit Mills' model of the hydrogen atom as well as the standard model.

Hydrinos

According to Mills, a specific chemical process he calls "The BlackLight Process" allows the bound electron to fall to an energy state below that of currently accepted quantum theory, at 1/integer that of the standard ground state radius. These smaller hydrogen atoms are called hydrinos. They can be thought of as redundant ground states (see Hydrino Study Group, message 3843, from Mills, dated Feb. 6, 2002).

The mechanism of hydrino formation consists of an energy transfer between a hydrogen atom and a catalyst ion or atom that is capable of absorbing a certain amount of energy from a hydrogen atom or hydrino (small hydrogen atom), usually an integer multiple of one hartree (one hartree is 27.2 eV). The total energy Mills claims is released for hydrino transitions is large compared to the chemical burning of hydrogen but less than nuclear reactions. Allegedly, limitations on confinement and terrestrial conditions have prevented the achievement of hydrino states below 1/30, which would correspond to an energy release of approximately 15 KeV per hydrogen atom. No-one outside Mills' group has produced 'hydrinos', nor have they been observed to occur naturally.

Collective Phenomena, High-Energy Physics, and Cosmology

Superconductivity

According to Mills, superconductivity is due to the extended nature of the electron, and in a superconductive lattice, the electrons forms "ribbons" of charge/current. This in contradiction to validated models of superconductivity, such as BCS theory, based on the Cooper pairing of electrons. Ordinary (low-temperature) superconductivity was thought to have been explained long ago by BCS theory, but serious problems with that theory have been found: P. Aynajian et al., Science 319, pp. 1509-1512 (2008). See also the "Perspectives" commentary on superconductivity by D. Scalapino, in the same issue of Science, on pp. 1492-1493.

Dark matter

According to Mills, hydrinos are the bulk of dark matter. He claims that they do not emit light, unless they are being formed or ionized. Over 90% of the visible universe consists of ordinary hydrogen, and according to this hypothesis the remaining matter in the universe (90% of the total mass of the universe) is hydrogen in stable states below that of the typical ground state. However, dark matter is also collisionless, meaning that dark matter particles do not interact by any means other than gravity or that such interactions are very rare . This contradicts the properties of hydrinos as claimed by Mills, who claims to have produced 'molecular hydrinos' and other chemical compounds containing hydrinos and normal matter. However, since hydrinos are held by Mills to be small hydrogen atoms, they would have a smaller collision cross-section than standard hydrogen atoms; and the Universe is known to have lots of the latter.

The accelerating expansion of the universe

Starting in the 1995 version of his book, Mills claimed that the universe is accelerating as it expands[[4]]. According to Mills, the universe expands and contracts sinusoidally over billions of years, due to a posited equivalence of matter and spacetime. The universe has been found to be expanding. Mills' model, however, does not agree with other observational evidence, nor does it explain various open questions in the topic of cosmic inflation. Mills doesn’t accept the reigning hypothesis of enormous expansion during an extremely brief and extremely rapid period of initial inflation.

The reigning cosmology has grave problems, and can now explain at best only 5% of the matter and energy in the Universe [and that 5% is achieved by rounding up]. Even much of the baryonic matter (ordinary matter made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons) predicted by the standard cosmological model (the SCM) is missing, half or more of it: see the “Perspective” article by Nicastro, Mathur, and Elvis, “Missing Baryons and the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium,” in Science 319 (January 4, 2008), pp. 55-57).

Alleged experimental evidence

The website of BlackLight Power Inc., founded by Mills to 'develop hydrino technology', claims to have produce these phenomena:

• Formation of plasmas in gas cells with input energies far below that required to form such plasmas.
• Spectral lines from gas cell plasmas which match the claimed predictions for hydrino transitions.
• Detection of excess heat from plasma cells using water bath calorimetry.
• New chemical compounds said to have been formed from hydrino hydrides (ie a hydrino which has captured another electron to form a negative hydride ion) which show unusual properties and structure.
• Molecular 'dihydrino' gas formation and detection.

Mills and collaborators claim only hydrino theory can adequately explain their results. Mainstream scientists have called into question the quality of these experiments, and have determined that the results can be explained by conventional physics.

Šišović et al have reported line broadening that contradicts Mills's models. Phillips et al have reported line broadening that supports Mills’ model.

A recent review of other experimental evidence for small hydrogen atoms (hydrinos) is in R. Mills et al., "Comprehensive identification and potential applications of new states of hydrogen," International Journal of Hydrogen Energy 32, 14 (September 2007), pp. 2988-3009.

Experiments have demonstrated a radial probability distribution of the bound electron in the hydrogen atom ground state that contradicts the idea of an orbitsphere. Atomic force microscopy has imaged the electron distribution function of numerous compounds and found it to agree with quantum mechanics, in contradiction to Mills' predictions. But Mills has been able to model hundreds of molecules with his theory (see his book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, Volume 2, Molecular Physics, and also his molecular-modelling software, below).

Controversy

2000

In a Space.com article on May 23, Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Prize winner and professor of physics at Stanford University, is quoted as saying:

[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.

Furthermore, Osheroff remained certain that hydrinos were a "crackpot idea".

2002

A NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I study was conducted at Rowan University, led by mechanical engineering professor Anthony Marchese, to investigate the so-called BlackLight Process for use in spacecraft propulsion. The team spent some time replicating results obtained by BlackLight, Inc., such as the observation of line broadening and excess heat (although the final report stated "Additional studies are required to rule out all other possible explanations other than 'excess power' for these observations.").

On October 27 2002, Bob Park, a professor at the University of Maryland, wrote a follow-up:

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 (not to be confused with Erik Baard, the Randy Mills apologist), 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. To his surprise, however, portions of the book seemed well organized. These, it now turns out, were lifted verbatim from various texts. This has been the object of a great deal of discussion from Mills's Hydrino Study Group. Mills seems not to understand what the fuss is all about.

Mills cited his sources and used the material for purposes of criticism and scholarship, and he was surprised to see that become the basis for attacks on him.

2004-2005

Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency published an evaluation that appeared in the New Journal of Physics. He concluded:

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!

No formal rebuttal has been published by Mills or his supporters. However, through other channels, Mills pointed out that Rathke had made a sign error. (The sign error does not affect the main conclusions, as Rathke notes in a corrigendum added 23 June 2006.) Mills did submit a rebuttal that was too long for the journal; but the editor replied that it would take a lot to convince him to publish even a short rebuttal: see message number 11 of the Society for Classical Quantum Mechanics.

2006-2007

Blacklight Power announced it had raised over $50M in venture capital.

In June, the subsidiary Molegos, Inc. was formed to market a molecular-modelling software application based on CQM theory. In October 2006, Molegos was renamed to Millsian. On June 14th 2007, Millsian made the beta-version of their molecular modeling software available for download.

Mills’ opponents continued to categorize his work as pseudoscience (see the categories at the bottom of this page); but Mills’ backers continued to support him, among other reasons because his opponents were unable to identify any pseudoscientist who has ever been able to do all that Mills has done.

External links

Advocacy

• Black Light Power, Inc., corporate website.
• [5], Society for Classical Quantum Mechanics
• Hydrino Study Group (HSG) website

Critical

• Blacklight power from Bob Park's newsletter What's New, January 13, 2006
• Hydrino rockets, What's New, June 21, 2002
• Patent nonsense, What's New, September 6, 2002

General media

• Hydrogen result causes controversy, from Physics Web, August 5, 2005
• Will BlackLight light up the world?, Kathleen McGinn Spring, Princeton Packet, January 20, 1999
• The Alchemists Of Energy, Forbes Magazine, May 15, 2000. — offers excerpts from Robert L. Park's book Voodoo Science, ISBN 0-19-514710-3
• Academics Question The Science Behind BlackLight Power, Inc., The Harvard Crimson, May 17, 2000
• Blacklight Power gets $50M; but is it profound, or utter nonsense? SiliconBeat, January 4, 2006
• Erik Baard (December 21 1999). "Quantum Leap". The Village Voice. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Erik Baard (April 25 2000). "The Empire Strikes Back". The Village Voice. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Alok Jha (November 4 2005). "Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head". The Guardian. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)