Mike Carrell wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen A. Lawrence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A historical walk on the wild side
<snip>, beginning Steve's comments:
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.
I don't know about you, but in my 38 years in a large company,
witnessing startups, etc., I found it always takes longer than you
think, even with established technology. With really new stuff, it takes
longer, much longer.
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.
Well, when I first encountered the idea of the OS, I was not comfortable
either, but for me the experiments matter, and the theory will fall into
place in due course. Nature speaks in experiments, mere men speak in
theory.
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.
This point has been pounded on endlessly on the HSG forum. As stated, it
implies that the posted body of work is essentially a work of fiction,
or at best carefully selected 'best' results, happy accidents. If it
were not that so much hangs on the experiments, they would be readily
accepted. Before the BLP labs were set up. Mills paid for experimental
work to be done in a number of industrial and university laboratories
with enough positiv eresults to keep going. Those reports are no longer
at the surface of the website, but are found in earlier editions of
Mills' book. If you insist that Mills have absolutely no connection with
a test, then the field is thin. Presently BLP is building test equipment
for the use of propective partners.
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.
I have been engaged in the colf fusion field longer than with BLP and am
quite aware of its status. You are correct that the CF effects have been
seen by many, and that is hopeful, but note, please, that it has
***not*** convinced anyone official in establishment physics.
Yes, there is a major pathology in mainstream science which isn't new.
Dinosaurs were thought to walk with their legs splayed out for an entire
generation because that's how the establishment thought they walked,
never mind what the joints looked like.
You
protest Mills' theory, but there is none for the whole spectrum of
CF/LENR/CMNS phenomena.
Au contraire. There are just two problems (that I can see) with CF:
How the 2H gets over the coulomb barrier, and how the energy gets out
without shattering the lattice or otherwise exhibiting itself as big
lumps of energy. In an admittedly subjective assessment, those don't
sound to me like things that need anything more than an _extension_ to
current theory in order to explain, and that opinion predates my brief
encounter with Hagelstein's work, which could actually provide such an
extension.
New things require additional theory. That's fundamentally different
from saying existing theory is wrong.
The whole field is cursed by a lack of
reproduceability, especially reproduceability of large effects. The
hallmark of the CF reactions is excess heat, and calorimetry is a basic
skill done with great expertise. Mills' water bath calorimetry is an
elegant experiment in which it is repeatedly shown that hydrogen can
yield 100 times the heat of combustion -- not as much as the nuclear
reactions, but very, very useful.
In terms of organization and devices, BLP is well ahead of the
CF/LENR/CMNS field.
And Steve, if you are familiar with the CF technology, the one paper you
should read is Phillips' paper on the water bath calorimeter, as
published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Is this online anywhere? I'll sniff around for it.
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.
Interesting. You believe CF is 'real' [as I do], yet there is no
accepted theory.
Yeah, I'm not Bob Park :-) Whether a theory is "accepted" or not makes
little difference; I just want it to be "plausible". Without an
existence proof for the possibility of a theory, I worry.
You disagree with Mills' theory, audacious as it is,
and deny that the experimental results are 'real' because work done in
other labs with Mills' advice might somehouw be contaminated.
It depends on how closely involved he was.
If Uri Geller were involved in the replication I'd tend to reject it, too.
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.
Well, try Conrads' paper: Emission in the Deep Vacuum Ultraviolet from a
Plasma Formed by Incandescently Heating Hydrogen Gas with Trace Amounts
of Potassium Carbonate H. Conrads, R. Mills, Th. Wrubel, Plasma Sources
Science and Technology, Vol. 12 (2003), pp. 389-395. You will have to
pay a fee to download this from the publisher's website.
OK, thanks, I'll look into it.
Conrads is in
Germany and not an employee of BLP. He set up the essential elements of
the BLP thermal reactor in his lab and varied it, finding an energetic
plasma only when the essential elements were present.
(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.)
If you reject such arbitrarily, then you reject every action by a lab to
have measurements done with specialized equuipment.
Perhaps I was not clear. Of course commercial test lab results are part
of many experiments, and I would generally assume the commercial labs
are on the up-and-up. The point is just that commercial test lab
results on samples provided by Mills do not provide "independent
replication" of his results (unless, of course, the test result is, in
itself, without reference to the prior history of the sample, anomalous
in some way).
The tritium results in CF experiments generally come from test labs.
They're interesting because they're part of the experimental results. I
don't reject them because that sort of result has been achieved by many
researchers in broadly similar experiments. HOWEVER, if _just_ _one_
researcher had had samples that showed tritium after a CF run, and if
that researcher had money riding on the outcome, I'd wonder if the
sample had been spiked before the test lab ever saw it. And that's all
I was trying to say here.
And to be
consistent, experiments done at great expense in lab A are invalid
because lab B can't afford the equipment.
Mike Carrell
