This is from a request for (free) support from a machining group I belong to. The OP (wave44) wants to duplicate some experiments but lacks funds, so…
But it is the nature of the experiments I find interesting. The researchers claim to have found several elements on their electrode that had no way of being there unless they were produced during the experiment. Here is the thread
This is the report on the experiment. I would love to see some comments from Chronos and others on this experiment.
I’m not seeing anything that looks like a scientific study in there. What experiment? Were results actually published? Peer reviewed?
I mean, transmutation is possible, so maybe? But you’d have an awfully hard time getting anything with a high enough energy from just electrodes, and there are a LOT of ways to end up with contamination.
Just standing back and looking for a moment, this appears to be an attempt to create a philosopher’s stone using free services. Kind of remarkable, right?
The Safire project report pdf
That looks like a presentation from someone who wants to sell me a timeshare in cold fusion technology.
I mean, there might be genuine careful research behind this, but I’d like to see the scientific papers rather than a promo with glossy photoshopped images including a page-sized photo of an elephant to support the contention that there is an elephant in the room. And anyway - that elephant is not in a room, it’s in the bush.
What Riemann said. That looks more like a brochure than a study. Which by itself isn’t fatal, except it also doesn’t seem to link to or cite any studies. It just makes assertions.
+1
I poked around a little and couldn’t find any papers on this (using keywords and authors), not even on arXiv, which is moderated, but not peer-reviewed, so it tends to have some pretty outré papers.
Also, Googling “the Electric Universe” does not return hits inspiring confidence.
The International Science Foundation seems to be a pretty bare website, with no real information on who is behind it.
There is no “University of John Hopkins” (there are two errors in this)
Finally, while plasma physics has some really cool unexplored areas, anyone with ultra-high-vacuum experience knows that plasma in that environment can easily knock atoms and molecules off surfaces, leading to deposition of contaminants in undesirable places. I see nothing in the pdf to indicate that special attention to materials and contaminants has been made.
As an alum of JHU (8 years spent there) I am required to barge into the thread and yell “It’s JOHNS Hopkins!”
Wasn’t there a long running thread / discussion here many years back on the “electric sun”.
Right. That Hopkins belongs to John.
Not to be confused with Jon Hopkins, who doesn’t have a university but if he did it would be very chill.
I got the same vibes when I started reading the “report.”
So they haven’t published their findings in a peer-reviewed journal? Red flag.
At least one person is calling this Crank Pseudoscience.
The Safire Project has now been taken under wing by Aureon Energy, Ltd. Seems a little sketchy that the company could produce a glossy website and a number of videos but can’t afford to hire a machine shop or welders to work with stainless steel tubing.
It looks like their Patreon campaign in 2020 was unsuccessful.
I feel like we’ve seen this topic before. Didn’t we have someone here on the SDMB claiming to have transmuted carbon to iron by making sparks using pencil leads?
The SAFIRE Project Is Not Real Science (YT opinion video by debunker Dave Farina).
So for the avoidance of doubt, a summary of that excellent video:
This is the latest incarnation of “electric universe” pseudoscience (dating back to Velikovsky), in which the stars are giant anodes powered an invisible stream of electricity from the galactic core. It is all utter nonsense contradicted by mountains of astrophysical evidence. It is being pushed by a combination of crackpot pseudoscientists (none of whom have qualifications in physics) and conmen. They have zero published research, peer-reviewed or otherwise.
Also, @Aspenglow, regarding the correction to the thread title: I’m not aware of any evidence that Johns Hopkins is involved in any way or that any experiment ever took place there. So perhaps leaving it as “University of John Hopkins” as vaguely mentioned in a caption in their promo or inserting the word “allegedly” in the thread title might have been more apt.
SAFIRE Project
The International Science Foundation (a front group of EU supporters who falsely claim to neither support nor oppose the Electric Universe hypothesis) says that they provided $2,200,000 USD to fund a laboratory experiment to test the EU claims regarding the nature of the Sun. There is no independent analysis of their work and no publications about SAFIRE found on Google Scholar. The SAFIRE Project is housed in Mississauga, and is documented in videos from the EU2016 conference. They say that their intent is to compare the results of this experiment to the results of NASA’s Solar Probe Plus mission, and thereby demonstrate whether the EU solar model has any grounding in reality.
Good call.
To be clear, it was the OP of the thread I referenced that could not afford the machining. He hoped to duplicate the Safire experiments.