Mike Carrell wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen A. Lawrence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A historical walk on the wild side
Horace Heffner wrote:
A walk on the wild side:
<http://www.facebase.com/rhodes.html>
Robert Bass addresses Rhodes Scholars at Caltech 5 yrs ago. Note
link at bottom of page.
Regarding the link: Wow. Impressive letter.
I don't know nearly enough to comment intelligently on Mills, but my
gut reaction has never been positive. I find Bass's insinuations very
easy to believe.
-------------------------------------------
I've been aware of Robert Bass for some years, and he is a brilliant
individual of considerable scope. For example, he taught astronomy at
BYU. A number of decades ago, I was following the Velikovsky affair
rather closely. One broad criticism of Velikovsky's 'Worlds in
Collision' scenario is the assumption that the planetray orbits have
been observed to be stable for centuries, and therefore could not
possibly have undergone the perturbations required by Velikovsky *and*
settled into stable orbits within historical time. Bass advanced an
anlysis of celestial dynamics based on sophisticated math which
purported to prove that the orbital damping is much higher than supposed
by conventional analysis, and therefore that argument could not be used
against Velikovsky.
Bass was present a Cold Fusion colloquium in 2005, organized by Dr.
Mitchell Swartz. Bass did not speak, and I didn't have a chance to speak
to him. apparently he was there in his capacity as a technical patent
attorney.
Steve Lawrence properly characterized Bass's letters as insinuating. I
can't speak to the mathematical analysis, which seems to parallel that
made by Connett and others. As for as the references to gyrotrons, Bass
was very superficial. Procurement of a standard gyrotron microwave
amplifier from a commercial source is in no way similar to the custom
design that would be required by Mills' speculations of the time, and
Bass should have known better if he had actually looked at the situation.
As far as the gyrotron thread, critics on HSG have thought me gullible,
but at the time I criticized the gyrotron idea as fundamentally
unfeasible because its operation requires a hard vacuum with long mean
free paths for electrons. Such is fundamentally incompatable with a BLP
plasma as the source of fast electrons.
Steve is quite ready to accept negative indicators about the Mills
affair. He should put the Bass comments into the context of their time
and look more carefully at the recent experiments for himself, not at
other's opinions about the experiments.
Well, if a demo product was promised in 6 months, back in 2000, that
doesn't speak well for the current situation... but then, everybody's
optimistic about delivery schedules and a five-year slip in something
like this might be reasonable.
But in any case, yes, it's true that I'm very open to negative criticism
of Mills. His theory requires, among other things, ditching the
uncertainty principle, which cuts pretty deep in an area where
predictions of the current theory have been very well verified. QM in
general did not exactly fly in with no opposition; it was tested and
found accurate in its domain of application over the objections of such
heavy hitters as Einstein. When someone starts by saying we need to
chuck it all because it's wrong about such a fundamental thing as the
ground state of hydrogen I don't get a comfortable feeling.
Now, you may very reasonably accuse me of all sorts of bad bias and of
having a shallow, prejudiced viewpoint as a result of that preceding
paragraph, and perhaps you're right. But in fact, my unreasoning
knee-jerk reactions, if you would like to characterize them so, go even
deeper than that in this case.
Mills has published results which include anomalous results of various
experiments, which prove that conventional physics and/or chemistry are
incorrect in some fundamental ways, while his theory correctly predicted
the results he observed. But until those experiments have been
replicated by an independent scientist, working from the published
description, without the direct involvement of Mills himself, I would
not say that they have been replicated. As far as I know, that hasn't
happened. Mills has stockholders, he has investors, he has pulled in a
lot of money with his theory; he is not a disinterested observer of the
results of his experiments. He has a lot riding on the results coming
out right. Therefore I hesitate to accept his testimony as to
surprising results he's obtained without solid external coroboration, in
the form of independent replication. Google "Hwang Woo Suk" if you
don't get my point.
To put it bluntly, it would be great if I were eventually proved wrong,
but at this time I don't believe in Mills, nor in the hydrino. Cold
fusion, which has been demonstrated many times over by numerous
researchers, seems far, far more likely to lead somewhere useful. If I
don't spend time reading Mills' papers, well, that's why.
So, call me a bigot, call me a fool; be that as it may, I'm convinced CF
is real, and I'm fairly sure Mills's results are not.
And if Mills' work _has_ been replicated by an independent lab, by all
means post the links to one or more papers published by his
replicator(s) and I will read them with great interest and I will
happily apologize for being such a pig-headed Bob Park-type.
(Tests of particular substances, at Mills's request, showing particular
individual properties, done by fee-for-service laboratories, aren't what
I'm talking about, of course.)
Mike Carrell
