Posts by WH
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Mills completed a degree in Chemistry under Farrell at Franklin and Marshall, obtained his medical degree at Harvard and did engineering coursework at MIT in his spare time...
Then he started a $100m company.
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In one of those strange coincidences, one of Mills’ biggest supporters is… Emiritus Professor of Chemistry John Farrell of Franklin and Marshall College.
Whatever else is going on, Randell Mills is an exceptionally smart chap:
He attended Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania where he graduated Summa Cum Laude, B.A. in 1982. He was a member of the Black Pyramid Honor Society and the Phi Beta Kappa National Honour Society where he was the only Junior invited to join in that year. He received the Willig Pentathlon Prize in Chemistry, one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in chemistry first established in 1912 which is awarded to the senior major who scores the highest on an exam covering the General, Analytical, Organic, Inorganic, and Physical areas of Chemistry. The name of each recipient is placed on a plaque and the student receives the income from the endowment established by Herman Luther Willig.
He also received the Michael A. Lewis Memorial Prize in Physics, the Isaac E. Roberts Biology Award, the Rawnsley Science Award, the Morgan D. Person Prize in Chemistry, the Fredrick C. Schiffman Award in Chemistry and the Theodore Alexander Saulnier Award in Chemistry.
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shown to be experimental error or deliberate fraud. I can’t think of any.
BLP reports that it can obtain megawatts of power from the plasmas under study. It’s difficult to imagine the kind of measurement error that could account for such results. It would be a remarkably elaborate fraud.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should suspend your disbelief or withhold your scepticism. It’s just something that might be worth keeping an eye on quietly.
The SunCell will either go into production or it won’t.
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… Ah. I see what you did here. Dammit, I’d managed to forget that post-truth was the winner.
I wouldn’t waste your time on purpose. It’s a really interesting subject and I couldn’t be more curious to see how it plays out. There’s a New Zealander who lectures in engineering at a local university (who I won’t name) following BLP’s progress as well.
The SunCell Mills was showing off on CNN has a production schedule and is going into field trials later this year. The CTO of the engineering firm working on the device has said that:
“This design fixes all of the outstanding engineering challenges required to manufacture the commercial product.”
Call it a moonshot or something. I’m not asking for your money.
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I’m not really inviting you to abandon quantum mechanics on the basis of something you’ve read on the internet. I’m not an engineer or a physicist.
The Blacklight Power NASA Innovative Advanced Research Phase I study (2002) is here. The conclusions are listed at page 37.
Meanwhile, Mills’ spectroscopic findings have been adequately explained as the product of already known processes; and no separate band has ever been observed in the hydrogen emission spectrum corresponding to Mills’ claimed lower-energy “hydrino” state.
Well, it’s entirely possible that you’re right. I think it's interesting that so many engineers who have done the experiments say that there is something unusual happening.
It looks like “baffle them with bullshit” to me.
I don’t think that means what you think it means.
Let’s just see what happens.
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WH, your comment has been reported as spam by another reader. I’m just a bit puzzled as to why you chose to post this here.
Hello and happy New Year.
2016 was disappointing in so many different ways and I thought I'd highlight something in a quiet moment that you might hear more about in the next few years.
the report as cited implies catalysts can magically create energy, which – if that is the actual claim – is risible)
I'm not sure that it does and I think it's worth pushing beyond preconceptions and misunderstandings of this sort.
It's widely recognised that an atom in an excited energy state emits photons - a.k.a. light - as it moves to lower energy states.
Mills' claim is that the hydrogen atom can be catalytically induced to emit large amount of light as it falls below what is currently considered to be its ground energy state. He is saying that the 'brilliant light' you can see in his videos is being emitted by hydrogen by way of a novel process.
Mills says that the spectroscopic profile of the light being emitted supports his view.
While I understand your reflex, I provided a list of about fifteen people and organisations that have looked into this at length and most of those have doctorate level qualifications.
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and ’ten thousand suns in a coffee cup’ sure does have a ring to it (or is it a torus?)
Apparently it's not any kind of torus.
Without getting back into the weeds of the thing, there's a physical process generating high energy light in frequencies not previously associated with hydrogen. Appropriately qualified people have attested to the fact that it's happening.
If you're interested, you'll be able to follow the company as it further develops its prototype with a view to release in 2018.
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There’s a US company called Brilliant Light Power that says it’s on the cusp of transforming the way the world produces and uses energy.
BLP is developing a prototype ‘SunCell’ generator that it plans to field test in 2017. The discovery underpinning the device is said to consist of a means of catalytically generating a high energy plasma using previously unknown properties of hydrogen. The very large amounts of energy released by the plasma is harnessed by concentrator solar cells within the BLP device, which is about the size of your oven.
The company’s detractors – a group that includes several winners of the Nobel Prize in physics – have noted that BLP’s theoretical claims are inconsistent with quantum mechanics. That said, many of BLP’s experimental results have been reproduced by physicists, engineers and other collaborators working with the company on agreed terms. Some of the verification reports and the CVs of those involved are published here. The company has also published a number of papers purporting to set out the spectroscopic and calorimetric evidence for the existence of the process it says it has pioneered.
As one US professor of chemical engineering who has worked with the company wrote in 2012:
"To summarise, when first hearing of the claims of BLP, it would be irrational not to be very skeptical, and prior to meeting [company founder] Randy Mills I was extremely skeptical. However, after having visited BLP, having participated in experimental design and execution, and having reviewed vast amounts of other data they have produced, I have found nothing that warrants rejection of their extraordinary claims. […] To be able to use hydrogen from water as a cheap and nonpolluting source of power would represent on of the most important technological breakthroughs in history."
I’ve been following BLP for a long time but 2017 is scheduled to be a very important year for the company. We’ll soon see whether it can deliver on its extraordinary public commitments.
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There’s a US company called Brilliant Light Power that says it’s on the cusp of transforming the way the world produces and uses energy.
BLP is developing a prototype ‘SunCell’ generator that it plans to field test in 2017. The discovery underpinning the device is said to consist of a means of catalytically generating a high energy plasma using previously unknown properties of hydrogen. The very large amounts of energy released by the plasma is harnessed by concentrator solar cells within the BLP device, which is about the size of your oven.
The company’s detractors – a group that includes several winners of the Nobel Prize in physics – have noted that BLP’s theoretical claims are inconsistent with quantum mechanics. That said, many of BLP’s experimental results have been reproduced by physicists, engineers and other collaborators working with the company on agreed terms. Some of the verification reports and the CVs of those involved are published here. The company has also published a number of papers purporting to set out the spectroscopic and calorimetric evidence for the existence of the process it says it has pioneered.
As one US professor of chemical engineering who has worked with the company wrote in 2012:
"To summarise, when first hearing of the claims of BLP, it would be irrational not to be very skeptical, and prior to meeting [company founder] Randy Mills I was extremely skeptical. However, after having visited BLP, having participated in experimental design and execution, and having reviewed vast amounts of other data they have produced, I have found nothing that warrants rejection of their extraordinary claims. […] To be able to use hydrogen from water as a cheap and nonpolluting source of power would represent on of the most important technological breakthroughs in history."
I’ve been following BLP for a long time but 2017 is scheduled to be a very important year for the company. We’ll soon see whether it can deliver on its extraordinary public commitments.